|  BOYD FARROW looks at efforts to move MBAs out of the classroom and into the virtual world
In the 2006 Fortune list of the 100 companies where MBA students say they would most like to work, Starbucks ranks number 22. However, an increasing number of students are already working there – usually hunched over a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop while their froth deflates. Distance learning, where university students attend classes via the internet, is on the rise. This is particularly true for MBA courses, where enrolees tend to be time-strapped, often holding down a full-time job as they study. Yet academics, employers and students are split on distance learning when it comes to MBAs. Take Europe’s leading MBA dispensary, the UK. Although the UK’s Association of MBAs (AMBA) accredits 121 MBA courses around the world, only 17 offer some sort of off-campus course and even they must have some face-to-face element, usually at weekends. AMBA member services manager Carl Tams says: “To us, MBAs should be experience-based. You learn a lot from your fellow students in a classroom situation, swapping ideas – this is especially useful on an MBA, as most MBA students are older. We wouldn’t accredit any online-only course.” This view is echoed by Stephan Chambers, head of MBA programmes at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, who reckons an online MBA “is better than nothing, but it is not even close to the real thing”. Chambers estimates that one third of the learning process is related to face-to-face collaboration. Those in favour of distance learning have equally strongly held views. Howard Thomas, dean of Warwick Business School, acknowledges that there are many people who want an MBA but can’t afford the fee or the time off work. In 2007 Warwick celebrates its 21st year offering a part-time MBA, and with 350 students, the course is the biggest programme within the university. Meanwhile, Aberdeen Business School, which launched an online MBA in 2005, recently claimed that after 12 months, its virtual students outperformed their classroom counterparts. Want to make Carl Tams splutter? Just mention the University of Phoenix, Arizona, which boasts an MBA programme with 40,000 students distributed all over the world. Inevitably, Phoenix’s dean of business, Brian Lindquist, trumpets his faculty’s ability to enable students to study while in employment or out of the country. The university can also continuously crank out new modules. Even more incendiary to the traditionalists is the fact that students at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business can now use Apple’s iTunes website to download speeches, interviews and conference presentations. Fuqua’s associate dean for executive education, Raymond Smith, says: “New learning technologies allow us to think differently about the ways we design and deliver learning programmes to busy executives around the world and allow us to enter new markets in new ways.” Some new-market-oriented institutions, such as the University of Liverpool and Heriot-Watt University’s Edinburgh Business School, insist that the sniffiness they often attract from accreditation bodies is usually derived from outmoded criteria. Alick Kitchin, business director at Edinburgh, says: “In business today, many executives are facing increasing pressure on their time as well as the need to update and expand their skills and expertise.
This has led to a dramatic growth in demand for development programmes that can meet these conflicting needs.” Kitchin points out that increasing time pressures have coincided with advances in technology that enable the delivery of high-quality, flexible learning programmes: “Over the last five to ten years, many development programmes such as MBAs have moved to the online environment, or at the very least have used chatrooms, downloads and simulations to deliver learning without the need for extended study leave or the restrictions of weekly classroom attendance,” he says. “Some schools, including Edinburgh, pioneered these techniques in the early 1990s and enjoyed first-mover advantage in this new market for flexible learning. Edinburgh has already graduated over 10,000 MBAs from all the major economies, and over 40% of all Fortune 500 companies now have employees on this MBA.” Delivery methods and courses do vary enormously. Phoenix and Liverpool, for example, distribute all their teaching materials online, with students emailing in their coursework. At the other extreme, the UK’s University of Durham delivers its course material in hard copy and on CD-ROM. Some business schools insist that participants visit the campus for introductory courses or to sit examinations. At Warwick Business School, for example, enrolled students have to attend courses for eight days in September each year. Schools such as Warwick and Bradford in the UK that also run full-time and executive MBA programmes (EMBAs) can allow students to transfer between modes of study. Half the students who enrol in Warwick’s distance learning programme will engage in at least one face-to-face module. A typical EMBA student is likely to be in their early thirties, with six to 10 years of working experience, so EMBA courses are specialised enough – or rare enough – to command fees of around €75,000. Customised courses start at a few thousand euros. Some are more novel than others. The Kaplan/Newsweek distance learning MBA caused ripples when it was launched last autumn, promising a “revolutionary approach” to business education, with nine intake cycles running over a 12-month period. The course combines the resources of Newsweek and its Washington Post Company stablemate Kaplan University, an online-only institution with 26,000 students. The MBA’s main selling points are up-to-the-minute case studies from Newsweek and instruction from senior staff on everything from global business strategy to leadership and ethics. As well as the great variety in MBA courses on offer on both sides of the Atlantic, there is a huge difference in the make-up of students. At most US universities, it is normal for just 1%–2% of students to be from outside the US. At 11 of the top 25 UK business schools ranked by the Financial Times, however, 70% of enrolled students are from outside the UK, often from Asia – a trend Tams expects to continue. At Edinburgh, teaching materials are available in Spanish, Chinese and Hebrew. While inter-school alliances are proving increasingly popular in the EMBA marketplace, only two – one consisting of an alliance between Arizona’s Thunderbird School of Global Management and Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey, the other being the Euro MBA programme – are prominent in distance learning. The Euro MBA executive programme, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2006, offers an EMBA courtesy of a consortium of schools – Universiteit Maastricht Business School; Open Universiteit Nederland; IAE Aixen-Provence; Audencia Nantes School of Management; and EADA, Barcelona. The consortium also has partners in Ireland, Germany and Poland. The programme was among the first to combine distance learning with residential modules and now boasts an alumni network from 21 different countries.  In the end, the main objective of most people studying for an MBA is to improve their job prospects. The Harris Interactive ranking of business schools, commissioned each year by the Wall Street Journal and compiled on the ratings of more than 4,000 corporate MBA recruiters, reveals that of the 19 US MBA programmes assessed in 2006 the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business ranked top, the same as in 2005. This ranking was attributed to Ross students’ ability to “work well within teams” as well as their “analytical and problem-solving skills and their overall well-roundedness”. The programme was also praised for its emphasis on practical experience, meaning employers are confident that Michigan graduates can connect theory with practice.
Recruiters assessed 24 international schools: nine in the US, nine in Europe, three in Canada and three in Latin America. ESADE, in Barcelona, came top, particularly praised for its socially responsible ethos. Its students come from around 30 countries, with only a quarter of them hailing from Spain. The next four spots were taken by Switzerland-based IMD, Mexico’s IPADE, London Business School and Thunderbird, the latter of which gathers students from 50 countries into its campus. The flexible EMBA courses offered by the top five international schools all involve some element of distance learning, but none are so virtual that enrolees’ only scheduling considerations are when to charge up their Sony notebooks and when to get their caffeine shots. |