Online MBA Forum

For many people who are studying their MBA online, receiving lectures and program materials electronically is an enormous benefit. It means that you can read a lecture as many times as you need to absorb it - something that is never available if you are in a classroom. You do not need to concentrate on taking notes, and therefore you can work through the material, supplementing it with your own research.

In fact online study is in many ways a very different activity from studying in the classroom. You need to apply discipline to do it well, but on the other hand you have materials to hand at the times at which you study best. Lectures become just one of the many resources you have to hand to do your work well.

For me, the largest benefit of working online is that it is largely self documenting, and therefore I can reference almost all of my past study activities. This is true of all communications as well as normal study materials - something that I have found invaluable.

Much of what we write in this blog is about MBA programs in general; it is not often we refer to online MBAs in particular. This makes sense, as studying a program - MBA or other - should not change because of the mode you choose to have it delivered. However it would not be realistic to say that it makes no difference at all, and sometimes one mode is chosen over another because of these differences.

Studying your MBA program online can change several aspects of the program. Group work is a large part of any MBA, and when you are studying online you need to be aware that group work has to be approached differently. In particular, managing communications between group members is much more deliberate that if you are doing this face to face. You need to be sure that you communicate with messaging and emails, and you need to keep the dialogue going. Email however gives you automatic documentation, very useful if you need to keep track of what is happening, and it can make communication that much more effective.

Tuition during an MBA program tends to be quite traditional in nature - unless you are fortunatel enough to be studying an online MBA. Lectures, tutorials and seminars are the pattern of tuition, plus of course some exercises that involve the group and often are inter-subject in nature, and practically based.

I asked my colleagues about this, and their answer is that their MBA students respond to this kind of learning. They use lectures and their content as a resource, but they also use other resources such as the library, the internet and other research sources, and the lecturers themselves.

MBA students also draw heavily on their own experience, experience of work colleagues, other students and new contacts through their educational institution. MBA students also tend to be very good at networking, and will create the necessary network of contacts to suit their own needs.