Online teaching is the staple of many MBA programmes, but recent moves by a number of schools may herald a global shift towards a reliance on technological tutoring.
“It’s integral to our teaching methods and to our programme designs,” says John Gallagher, associate dean for EMBA programmes at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in North Carolina. “We’d be in trouble if we didn’t have it.”
EMBA participants are students who bring experience from their work environment to share with each other when they meet, says Prof Gallagher, and Duke has long seen the internet as a way to amplify the value of those physical meetings. And when students are away from the classroom, technology supports their collaborative projects and relationship building.
As the technology matures, schools are deriving benefits less from revolutionary developments than from the steady increase in reliability – first, of hardware and software, more recently of online tools and communication – and the ubiquity of broadband.
“The technology is reliable enough that you are willing to say: ‘Let’s do that,’ and not worry about the thing not working,” says John Walsh, EMBA programme director at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Marianne Vandenbosch, manager of the programme, adds that with the increasing availability of online connections travel can no longer be used as an excuse for being unable to stay in touch.
Prof Gallagher at Duke admits to having been surprised by the lack of dramatic breakthroughs in technology over the past few years.
“I had expected there to be a kind of a firehose of new technologies emerging and exploding on a regular basis,” he says. Instead, it has been a series of very important incremental changes that have made a difference.
One exception, he feels, has been a recent breakthrough in the usefulness of web conferencing. “The technology began in the late 1990s, and has been intriguing, but for us has never been reliable enough until the past year or year-and-a-half, when you could really start to build something round it.”
With Duke’s EMBA students spread around the world, web conferencing has to work well everywhere, says Prof Gallagher. “It has got to that point lately – so that has made a real change.”
Other schools have also been exploring more sophisticated uses of the web as more tools become available. Cass Business School at City University in London has been using an Adobe internet product, Presenter, to add an audio track to a PowerPoint presentation, enabling audio-enhanced lectures to be published on the web. Clive Holtham, professor of information management at Cass, says its main use has been to provide revision material, or to give students in-depth access to the lecturer’s views on specialist topics not covered fully in main lectures.
IMD, meanwhile, has found a novel use of information technology, with special software that tracks how networking and relationships develop each time the EMBA cohort meets.
In use for the past three years, the software is called UCINet and was developed by Kentucky-based Analytic Technologies. Students are asked to fill out a form to say who in the cohort they have met and talked to or would consider to be a close colleague, and the software turns this data into a spider’s web-style diagram. A new diagram is produced after every face-to-face meeting to show the class how the network is growing.
One area where EMBA programmes are hoping for further technology improvements – if not breakthroughs – is in videoconferencing. Cass, for example, has found that another Adobe product, Connect Pro, is ideal for “video tutorials” for part-time students who may not have to come into school for a half-hour meeting.
“Additionally, some part-time MBA student groups have had their own video-meeting rooms set up, so they can interact with each other from home or work,” says Prof Holtham.
Videoconferencing has also been used successfully for point-to-point communication, in which, typically, a guest speaker is beamed in from a distant location to a room in which a small group of students is sitting. IMD uses this system to allow EMBA students to interview Matti Alahuhta, chairman of the school’s foundation board and chief executive of Kone, the Finnish liftmaker. He is often too busy to appear in person every time that Kone is the subject of a class, says Prof Walsh, but “the interactivity works pretty well”.
However, there is broad agreement with Josep Valor, associate dean for faculty and research at Iese Business School in Spain, when he says that videoconferencing is not yet good enough to handle, a discussion between 30 people in different locations. Prof Valor should know – he holds the chair in information systems at Iese.
Prof Gallagher would like to see improvements in another area, too: document creation by a group. He points out that Duke’s EMBA students are part of teams of five or six for at least half of the work that they produce, but are not together physically because they live in different places.
“It is still awkward producing these Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in a way that supports learning and sharing,” says Prof Gallagher. “[The solution] is deeper, more purposeful and thoughtful tools for group work.”
