Online MBA Forum

My friend who has studied for his MBA at Insead has been in touch again, and we have found a good seed fund investor for one of his ventures. The investor is a co-director of a fellow student of his, who is interested in telecoms and the way that it is being used in the new convergence communications industry.

The venture is about using mobile phones for advertising, so this venture fits the investor's portfolio. I was interested to see the due diligence that he requested for this venture, which was, after a fairly cursory look at the technology, mostly about my friend, his background and his assoicates - including me.

I have had a theory for a long time that it really matters what kind of person you are when you are starting up a new venture, because investors are investing in you and your ability to get things done.

I got asked what the difference is between a professional graduate degree and an academic graduate degree yesterday, and I had to do some hard thinking.

In the case of an MBA, it's actually quite easy to define it as a professional degree, because many of the courses are factual in nature, and the graduate part of the program is really about the way that this knowledge is applied across the subject boarders. However, some of the other professional graduate degrees are not quite as easy to define, as they involve some specific training in the indivdual profession.

Academic graduate degrees are often based on research at least in part. This means that the graduate can continue to analyse present knowledge, and use it as a basis to synthesise new knowledge - the expected outcome of research.

Hmm, certainly the trend is upwards regarding numbers. Some 1.98 million people enrolled on online courses in 2003, and the numbers were up to 2.35 the next year. It's predicted that by 2008 10% of all college students will be enrolled on an online program. The largest number of high school graduating students ever in the US is going to be the class of 2009, so there is going to be tremendous pressure to provide college courses in all kinds of different modes.

This pressure is really going to impact on MBA programs, as the demand for professional graduate degrees increases. Online MBAs will benefit from the move to make them mainstream along with other online programs, and capacity for good programs will be easier to increase.

Did you know that 9% of all degree enrolments in the US are for online degrees, and of those the majority are online MBAs? The Washington Post ran an article yesterday about online degrees, with some interesting issues attached about how it takes time for new ideas to be accepted particularly for professional qualifications, but that many people had started to see what great advantages could be gained from studying online.

It seems that the kind of people who study for an MBA are particularly innovative, and are attracted to the practicalities of working and studying online. So MBAs lead the field.

With more and more institutions recognising the advantages of being able to offer programs to students who do not necessarily have to attend on campus, they are able to capture the audience of people who travel, work abroad and who are forward thinking.

One of my ex-students wants to take an online MBA, and he is working towards maximizing his GMAT scores. He decided to take some online tutoring to try to improve his scores. To his surprise, he could get tutoring for around a quarter of the price if he accepted a tutor from India.

He is now using someone who has an MBA and two other graduate qualifications, and is paying $25 per hour for the tutor. He says that they are excellent, and he is sure that he will be able to improve his scores this way.