Online MBA Forum

I had lunch today with a lecturer from the business school of a university. Part of his teaching load is to tutor an online MBA degree.

He commented that one of the major outcomes of his teaching is the amount of consultancy he is offered through the students that he teaches on the MBA. We discussed the pros and cons of this - the people who are commissioning the consultancy have some knowledge of the person doing the consultancy, and may even have been the student on the MBA program. He gets consultancy without having to go out and sell himself.

However, his comment is that if he had done his job properly, the student could have done the consultancy project himself. I have to say I have some reservations myself, if you get on well with someone at this level, it's entirely possible that you want more of their time and input.

I've just spent sme time working on a weekend case study with a group of lecturers. this case study is the basis of an MBA group practise. The big problem we have been wrestling with is how to assess the group work.

In fact we came up with a system that is as likely to work as any other. Each member of the group has to do an assessment of the work done in the group, including their own. They have to justify marks, and comment on each member's work under some five headings.

We mark our particular parts of the weekend, and we have a panel interview with each student, discussing their progress and their mark allocation. We think that because they will have to defend their assessments face to face, it will help them work out with some objectivity their own and other people's performance. We will decide just how we combine our impressions and the student marks when we are at the end of this MBA exercise.

I've noticed a new trend in recent years, that of institutions creating a Bacehlor's degree in Business Administration. Usually these institutions run an MBA, and this programme becomes a feeder into the Master's degree.

I'm not entirely sure whether I think these are a good idea. The first thought that comes to me is that MBAs are for people who might not have previous qualifications. This is the point of using GMATs as a guide to good potential students, plus the concentration on previous career achievements.

The second thought is that by creating a Bachelor's degree, it assumes that students will not have previous experience. They will be learning theory only, without the ability to "place" the theory into the framework of their own working lives. This makes professional education of this kind a very different kettle of fish than that orginally envisaged by the institutions that designed MBAs.

Did you know that gaining an MBA is likely to affect your whole family? There has been quite a lot of research regarding education and family lifestyle, and the latest I have had sight of is from Massey University in New Zealand.

Apparently parents who have qualifications are more likely to have children who will also gain qualifications - and the higher the parents' qualifications, the higher the childrens' achievements. Mothers have a more pronounced effect on the achievements of children, although professional qualifications are more likely to affect children than purely academic qualifications.

I suppose this can seem like common sense. Mothers who are educated will automatically pass on ways of doing things that will help their children in education. And being surrounded by a certain set of expectations means that goals get set early in life - always a major factor in achievement.

But it's worthwhile knowing that your MBA will not only benefit yourself.