The Wired MBA

When shopping for an MBA program, you may wonder about the role online learning will play in your education. Online learning is one of many tools that enrich the executive MBA experience. Students that hold down a career while balancing other obligations require flexibility, and that’s where the Internet comes in. In fact, almost all executive MBA programs incorporate an online component. Students will benefit from the time professors and schools have spent polishing the online classroom.

Classroom Complement

At Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, almost every class in the executive MBA program has an online component. “If you use it to enhance your classroom experience and extend classroom discussion, then I think you are fully leveraging the technology,” says Dr. Karen Gulliver, executive director of the Powertrak MBA program and associate dean of international initiatives at Saint Mary’s in Minneapolis.

The online tools aren’t used to replace classroom time. Rather, they increase the number of interactions between instructors and students, Gulliver says. Saint Mary’s students also have access to recorded classroom sessions. An MP3 file is made available to students so they can listen to the day’s lesson again. With audio files of lectures and class discussions, students can go back and brush up on a topic they didn’t quite understand, or they can catch up if they missed a class.

The needs of the students have driven the improvements to and acceptance of the online classroom. Minneapolis-based Walden University has provided distance learning since 1970 and has offered online master’s and doctoral degrees for several years. “Rather than being isolating, the online format offers a rich, stimulating environment in which students can interact with professionals working in other cities, countries, and business cultures,” says Dr. Rebecca Sidler Krysiak, faculty chair of the MBA and engineering management programs at Walden University.

At Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Barbara Keinath, director of the Center for Online Learning and professor of management, is working toward the spring or summer 2007 launch of Metro State’s cohort-based online executive MBA program. In cohort-based learning, groups of students take every class together and get to know their classmates well, which enhances interactions and program retention. Students enrolled in Metro State’s online MBA will get to know each other through “residencies”—face-to-face, on-campus interactions, at the beginning and middle of each program. All class work in between takes place on line. The residencies usually last three days and offer students orientation to the course, and community building.

Students in cohort groups working toward health care MBAs at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis come to campus for two weeks each semester. The rest of the class is conducted on line. Dave Brennan, assistant dean of graduate business programs at St. Thomas, says that the online environment can encourage student interactions; fellow students often step in and answer student questions if the professor doesn’t get to it first.

Michael Kaley is the director of the University of Phoenix’s St. Paul and Minneapolis campuses, where students can choose to earn their executive MBA entirely on line, in a classroom with face-to-face instruction, or through an on line–classroom combination. “Many of our students alternate between online and classroom instruction based on the demands of their personal and professional lives,” Kaley says.