Anyone who has experienced the case study method of teaching – with spontaneous discussion emerging as a professor solicits answers from a class of students – may think that translating this part of the MBA into the virtual world would be impossible.

However, academics and educationalists agree that the online version of the case study is in many ways far richer and more satisfying than the offline version.

In the case study method of teaching as developed by Harvard Business School, MBA students read up on a business case and, once in the class, thrash out alternative solutions to a commercial or organisational problem with the professor directing the discussions.

Some of this experience is certainly hard to replicate online. “What you’re losing is the rapid fire response that managers are often confronted with in the real world,” says Mark Rice, dean of Boston-based Babson College. “Because in the real world, you don’t have 48 hours to respond – you have to be able to think quickly on your feet, aggregate a lot of information quickly, make a decision and take a position.”

However, although Professor Rice concedes that face-to-face learning can give students valuable experience in this respect, he is a firm advocate of teaching cases in the virtual world, something that Babson professors do through the college’s fast track MBA course – an accelerated online MBA degree programme.

One of the main advantages of the online version, he says, is increased student participation. “It’s amazing to see people come in who in a normal classroom would be silent and not contributing to the learning of their classmates – and they usually are the deep thinkers and are not afraid to be vocal in a virtual classroom.”

Back in the real classroom, most sessions have a group of students that are active participants, some who contribute occasionally and those that will not enter the discussion. This might be because English is not their first language or they are less confident than others.

“Often people who, for cultural or other reasons, are reluctant to be vocal in class will be quite vocal in a distance arena,” says Christine Pearson, professor of global business at Thunderbird School of Global Management, who uses casework in her distance learning. “There tend to be people who are very vocal within any class … but with distance learning you have people with really fine things to say and they’ve now got the forum and the time to fully think them through before they press the send button – that enhances the experience for the entire class.”

Online chat rooms, discussion boards and email mean student and study teams can be in constant contact, allowing them to exchange ideas on the cases that they have been assigned.

Another part of what enhances the online experience is the richness of the technology itself and its ability to be live, flexible and interactive. At Warwick Business School for example, electronic case studies are presented via a range of media, including audio, video and internet sites – all of which can be added to by both the professors and the students.

“If a new web link comes out we can change it immediately,” says Ray Irving, Warwick’s head of learning resources development. “For example, we’ve got a case study on the international marketing activities of Coca-Cola that’s permanently live, so if a report comes out saying Coca-Cola is going to try a new drink in China, we can link to that – and the students can add links too.”

However, simply because the technology is available does not mean professors can sit back and leave the students to continue the discussion through online postings. “Unless the structure is put in place, that doesn’t necessarily occur,” says Alan Southern, deputy director of the e-learning unit with responsibility for the MBA programme at Liverpool University.

He also points out that online case study teaching requires more than simply pasting the classroom study material on the web. “Online learning isn’t a replica of on-campus learning,” he says. “It needs a different mode of interaction between students and the instructor.”

Prof Pearson believes that this interaction means thinking in a different way about what is asked of the students. “You don’t have the synchronised discussions that you have face to face, so you have to build richness into the way you ask the questions,” she says.

The way Prof Pearson does this is to refer students more frequently back to their own work experiences than she would in a traditional face-to-face classroom. “And I try to ask questions that have enough substance to them to keep them engaged even when they’re not able to read each other’s non-verbal responses.”

Above all, she says, web technology means that more students can participate in a case study than would ever be possible face-to-face.

“I did a programme on behalf of Thunderbird for engineers and managers from General Motors from all over the world,” she says.

“You couldn’t get that many people together on a regular basis to go to a class from a company, because they’re working all the time.”