Welcome to MBA Podcaster, the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Catherine Girardeau. “Our model early on was to think about the Internet as a way of connecting people and of structuring conversations and exchange of ideas among the people.” “We are trying to make this as close to a full-time, in-class experience as possible in a distance learning way.” “They are involved in learning through a range of technologies, using things like blogs and Wikis and podcasts and discussion forums and then even occasionally a live but virtual classroom.” “We look at our program as being at a distance, but always having someone to talk to.”

We just heard four guests from four of the nation’s top business schools, talking about some of their MBA programs. What do these programs have in common? They’re all offered either fully or partially online. Our show today looks at Top Online MBA programs.

We’ll start by introducing the four programs, at Penn State University, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, and Babson College. Of the four schools we talked to, Penn State’s iMBA program is most fully online. John Fizel chairs the iMBA program, “Well the Penn State iMBA Programs spans eight terms which are delivered over 23 months and composed of 20 online courses. All but two weeks of the program are delivered online. The goal of the iMBA is to develop general managers.”

Like most of the other programs we explored, Penn State’s iMBA requires and on-campus residency. John Fizel says these residencies give the iMBA a “competitive edge” over other programs. “In the first residency experience, students actually study and they go onsite to a company. With the company they have the opportunity to interact with the executives from different functional areas of this real business and from that they develop a report that integrates the content of the first year of the program and their professional experiences by creating organizational, financial, and strategic alternatives to be considered for the firm’s future operations.”

Fizel said the key thing Penn State is trying to do with the iMBA is to encourage interaction, “We want to have students interacting with each other, we want faculty interacting with the students, we don’t want someone in a distance education program who really is at a distance and alone. We look at our program as being at a distance, but always having someone to talk to.”

Fizel is also a professor of Economics at Penn State. I asked him to talk about economic trends that relate to online degree programs, “There is no doubt that the online education market is growing, it’s growing tremendously. This has been growing at 10% or more per year; it has been far exceeding the growth in the overall higher education, student population. With online MBA applicant numbers have increased by 50% over the last year. It’s going to continue to grow because, one; the knowledge of technology by students and the general populous is growing and so that the online environment is not something strange, but actually very common place, the tools that ere being used are common place.

Globalization also is going to increase demand because people are looking for quality education and it doesn’t matter whether you are in Pennsylvania, California, Hawaii, China, Australia, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia, you can come and select the quality online programs that are available in the United States.”

We’ll look next at Babson College’s “blended” MBA program, the Fast Track MBA. It’s a part-time program combining traditional classroom instruction with web-based learning. The Fast Track requires two-day residencies on campus or at satellite campuses every six weeks. “Overall it’s a 24-month program.” Anne Donnellon is Faculty Director of Babson’s Fast Track MBA, “Students come to Babson or to our satellite campus in Portland, Oregon every five to six weeks or so, sometimes a little bit longer, for two full days of classes where they get together with their classmates. Then in the meantime they are involved in learnings through a range of technologies.”

Donnellon talked about how technology shapes the Fast-Track MBA programs for both students and faculty. “One of the things that I’ve noticed as a faculty member from the very beginning of this program is that this curriculum, the online portion of it, allows students in some ways to customize their education.

Because technology is evolving so rapidly, we’re all coming back in to learn what’s the latest and who is using what kind of techniques for what kinds of classes. An example might be Second Life, which a number of us are just beginning to look at and consider how could I use this in my class. So there’s an ongoing need and desire on the part of the faculty to stay up on opportunities that new technology provides.”

I asked Donnellon what FastTrack students say they’ve gained from the program, besides a competitive MBA degree. “It really is about being able to continue your career momentum while you are adding skill sets in a very focused way that is extremely attractive to the Fast Track students, and maybe at the end of the day, the thing they love the most is the cadre of people that they engage with here.

I mean it’s phenomenal, we don’t always have in our work place the same kind of highly talented, highly ambitious leaders that they meet when they come to campus and they see who their cohort is.”

We’ll look next at the “hybrid” MBA programs at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. John Gallagher is Associate Dean for Executive MBA programs at Duke. He said Fuqua’s programs are not traditional distance learning programs. “We refer to it as the Place and Space Model, today people may refer to that as a hybrid model.”

Students in Duke’s Place and Space model EMBA programs complete half of their course content in face-to-face meetings with program faculty during periods of “residency”. This requires physical proximity to the campus but, as Gallagher describes, Duke’s partially online EMBA programs are offered all over the world. The Cross-Continent EMBA program was introduced in 2000. Gallagher said it hits the same demographic as the traditional daytime MBA program. “Average age being about 27-28 and it’s really aimed at those people who would be considering a full-time, daytime program normally but they really have no desire to leave their current position, they’d rather accelerate their career and make a significant change in it. And so that program draws primarily from the United States but has about a 40% international representation in that cohort. That program also does quite a bit of traveling. Out of the eight residencies in that program, three of them are international, one is Europe, one is India, and one is in Asia.”

Gallagher said Duke’s Global Executive MBA is designed for people being trained for global international management responsibilities. “The “Global Executive” has students that have an average age of about 40 with about 14 years of work experience on average. That program is really designed for people that are really working anywhere in the world. It is very much the source of the phrase that you can get a Duke MBA and live anywhere.”

Students combine online coursework with residencies all over the world. “There is a residency in Istanbul, there is a meeting in Budapest, one in New Delhi, one in Hong Kong, Buenos Aires and Rio. So that program travels a great deal, faculty and the students travel to those locations as part of the program.”

Duke’s newest “place and space” MBA program is the Duke Goethe program, a dual degree program in which students receive a degree both from Duke University and from Frankfurt University in Germany.

One of Gallagher’s research interests is Advanced Computer Applications for Teaching and Learning. So I asked him how social media and other new technology applications enable Duke’s Place and Space MBA programs. “Early on, we made a decision that the Internet for us was not about distributing content and distributing course material or lectures to students. Our experience has been particularly in Executive MBA programs that a huge amount of value comes from the exchange of ideas and the interchange among students with very different backgrounds and experience.

So the technology that we have employed has always had a very strong emphasis toward interaction and support of conversation, and idea exchange. The backbone for us has been the set of tools that have been developed for collaboration, cooperation, project management, and that sort of thing for working professional who are putting their heads together to try and get a project completed.”

Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business’ FlexMode MBA program is a unique distance learning program that incorporates some online work, but requires more residency than any of the other schools we talked to. The FlexMode MBA requires online attendance of video-conferenced classes at participating corporations. The typically six to eight students per site come from those participating Fortune 500 companies.

Krystal Brooks is Team Lead for admissions at the Tepper School’s Flex programs. “The program, because it’s not a singular online at your home type of program, it works best when the students can work together on different company sites and that way the students can go to work, when they are finished with work, go to class, go with their colleagues and network it in that way.”

Is any on campus time required for FlexMode students; do they come to Carnegie Mellon for any amount of time during the year? “The one required is our orientation program which starts at the very beginning of your academic program here in FlexMode and you would come on campus, be able to meet the faculty one-on-one and your classmates and colleagues that might be participating in classrooms across the United States. And that starts a sense of community right away.”

Students who want to accelerate their program can come to Carnegie Mellon for “Fast Week.” “That’s an option for students to come to campus and basically spend one full week of class time with us, here in Pittsburgh. They take classes 9:00 to 5:00 and are able to accelerate through the program because that one week of class takes place of one mini semester here in the program.”

I asked Krystal Brooks to describe a typical FlexMode experience from the student’s perspective, “You would go to work at your company and you would stick around at the end of the day and go to a company classroom site and there you would have a large screen that would connect you via satellite to the faculty here in Pittsburgh to your colleagues at different company sites and the faculty member would be able to see you, be able to call on you, you would be able to ask your colleagues questions across the different site locations and you would really be able to interact and the video conference allows us to be able to do that.”

To wrap up, I asked each of my four guests to give a word of advice to potential students for their programs. John Fizel, with Penn State’s iMBA program, “So really what is most important now when one is looking at an online program, it is to look at the program of a traditional institution and then ask yourself, do they have quality students, do they have quality faculty, do they have a quality curriculum? In the iMBA we are talking about students that have seven years experience on average. We are talking about having students with GMAT scores around 600 or above which is 70% on that test. We’re talking about students from diverse academic and professional background who share a variety of their own professional experiences with each other.”

Krystal Brooks of Carnegie-Mellon’s FlexMode program, “All MBA students really need to think about three questions: why a MBA, why now and why a particular school you’re applying to. I think particularly for distance learning students, time management is a crucial component when you are thinking about in a distance learning MBA, because not only are you balancing family life and school life, but you add in that component of being a full-time professional and all of your work commitment.”

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