If anyone is offering an online domestic MBA in China they have managed to keep it very quiet. Problems of quality, acceptance, price and access have overwhelmed the Asian business school fantasists who saw easy gold in distance education.
The sharper schools appear to have absorbed the lesson that internet teaching is both logistically demanding and against the grain of the students’ own need to test themselves out against each other. Even so, Asia may be on the cusp of a great boom in online business degrees.
“Very few students in India are doing online MBAs or the like, but that’s going to change soon – within months even – because people desperately need to acquire new skills, but are scared to take time off work,” says BR Natarajan, the dean of off-campus learning at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Rajasthan, India, which has pioneered internet MBAs in India.
“Education providers will be doing something very wrong if online business education isn’t starting to take off here within 12 months,” he adds.
The painful realisation that simply pumping lecture notes across the ether does not constitute a credible MBA course has caused many business schools to become cautious about promoting internet learning.
Shorter programmes on more technical topics like accounting or internet marketing have proven popular. An agency like the Singapore-based U21Global can continue to attract floating students with repackaged courses from brand-name foreign universities. But elsewhere many ambitious offerings have crumbled in the face of unexpected costs and complexity.
“The old idea was that students would be satisfied if you simply pasted up a course on the internet,” says Professor Bruce Shortland-Jones, director of the Learning Support Network at Curtin University in Western Australia. “No one believes that any more. It’s tricky, it eats up faculty time and you get hit by several layers of cost.”
Business students themselves, it turns out, dislike the idea of doing everything online and will go to some lengths to meet tutors and fellow students.
“It is very clear that blended learning is the way to go,” says Birla’s Professor Natarajan. “There is tremendous student resistance to the idea of doing everything online. Even the busiest manager wants face-to-face learning one or two times a semester.”
There is also a catch-22: online business programmes firing on all academic cylinders are expensive to operate, but many potential Asian students appear reluctant, or unable, to pay the high fees.
Many people in the industry now talk of a “second phase” of modest growth in online student numbers, encouraged by a steady stream of more interactive distance degrees. Asia’s premier business schools will probably wait to see how internet education technology shapes up before committing themselves. That does not mean however that they will be right. Hong Kong’s City University has quietly shelved the online MBA it launched in 1999 because demand was so poor. Yet the planners at City’s Business Faculty admit that demand for global business skills is building in China to the point where it could trump concerns over the pedagogic experience.
If Asian degree providers come up with the right mix of quality, credibility and price, the growth in online courses could be explosive.
“Places like China are different. Millions of Chinese students already listen to lectures that are transmitted via television,” says Chung Siu Leung, an associate professor at the Open University of Hong Kong’s school of business and an expert on distance learning. “Don’t forget that most Chinese students are quite comfortable with traditional, passive learning.” he adds.
Asia’s putative Ivy League business schools may be correct when they claim that any rapid expansion of online business degrees will run the risk of an equally brisk slide in academic merit. Yet they will also miss the point that new generations of students who live inside the internet may be delighted with a virtual business school, says Ian Fenwick, a visiting professor and consultant to Sasin Business School in Bangkok and an expert on online marketing. “Isn’t a kid who has been communicating digitally since the age of four going to be entirely comfortable learning off the net?”
He adds: “Technology can change everything. The online experience will be massively improved and the price will come down. Asia could surprise us.”
