Learning ... at a Distance
By Jerry Lynch
Academic Director, Krannert Executive Education Programs
Purdue University
Suppose you’re in your early or mid-30’s. Suppose you’ve been out of school for 10 years or so. Suppose you’re a doctor who manages a medical clinic in the middle of Montana. Or, suppose you’re a salesperson who runs an export business in Guatemala City. Or, suppose you’re an engineer working for a petroleum company on the far North Slope. Now, to make it interesting, suppose you want to get an MBA.
Clearly, you’re not going to get it by going downtown to your local university and attending classes a couple of nights a week. Nor are you going to get it by going over to the school every other weekend for two days of classes in their Executive MBA program. This isn’t Chicago; it’s Prudhoe Bay.
So, what are your choices? One is to quit your job, move your family, give up your current life, and perhaps take on a sizeable educational loan--to go to a full-time MBA program somewhere--and then start looking for another job when you finish. Another is to stay where you are and sign up for one of the proliferating online MBA programs--maybe even an accredited one--and interact with a flat-panel screen display for the next several years.
But there’s a third option: one of the select few Executive MBA programs that are organized around a relatively small number of intensive on-campus residencies where you actually see and talk to real faculty members and live classmates. The on-campus classroom sessions are combined with a set of reading and written assignments for the program participants between the residencies, submitted electronically and returned in the same manner. Call it “learning at a distance”, rather than distance learning.
An example would be the Executive MBA program at Purdue University’s Krannert Graduate School of Management. The Program was begun in 1983 in response to a request by the General Electric Corporation for a dedicated MBA program for the company’s IT professionals. GE wanted its people to get away from their work environments and interact with their colleagues from elsewhere in the company in a central location having appropriate educational facilities and a strong on-site teaching faculty. The program evolved into an open enrollment program in 1985 and now attracts individuals from a wide range of firms and industries to the Purdue campus not only from all over the U.S. and Canada but also regularly from Central and South America, Asia, and Europe.
Following an initial four-day Orientation session at Purdue, the program participants go off to their disparate locations with a schedule of 10 weeks’ worth of assignments to complete for each of four courses. At Orientation, they have been divided into five-person study groups and have gone through team-building exercises to build cohesion. They stay in touch with each other remotely and work on their assignments together using chat rooms, discussion forums, and--often--scheduled weekly conference calls.
Once back on campus for two weeks, they’re ready for the live class sessions that expand upon and solidify the knowledge they’ve accumulated during their time away. As importantly, they have an ongoing opportunity to interact with and learn from their fellow students, both in the classroom and in the evenings in their study teams getting ready for the next day’s classes. As we have found over the years, there is at least as much learning that occurs as a result of these study group activities as takes place in the formal class sessions--obviously, not something easily duplicated in a purely online MBA program, if at all.
What also is not easily duplicated is the highly focused nature of the learning process on campus. The participants are away from their work environments and able to concentrate on the study task at hand without interference or distractions. They don’t have the frequent and time-wasting commute to class that is required to attend the typical evening or weekend MBA program. And, for many of them, simply being on a university campus again--with all its atmosphere and activity--for two weeks from time to time is a further positive part of the program package.
The other feature associated with the on-campus class sessions is that the faculty teaching in the program are not “adjunct” or part-time faculty (which is not unusual for evening or weekend programs) but are regular tenure-track faculty of the Krannert School. Thus, the participants are assured of getting the same quality of instruction that students in the School’s full-time programs get.
This process is repeated six times over a 22-month span in a series of three modules, each of which corresponds in course content approximately to an academic semester. The last residency is held in an overseas location, typically Asia or Europe, to add further richness and diversity to the educational experience. The doctor from Montana, the exporter from Guatemala, and the engineer from Prudhoe Bay have in fact all gone through that process and have become graduates of the Purdue program.
But let’s consider a different scenario. Suppose that, when you started your Executive MBA, you were an engineering manager working in East Hartford, Connecticut, for the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies Corporation. Suppose a year into the program you were transferred to Singapore to manage part of Pratt’s aircraft engine repair and maintenance operations at the company’s facility at Changi Airport. Suppose you had opted for a standard weekend or evening Executive MBA program in the Hartford area, or in Boston.
The credits you earned in the U.S. almost certainly would not carry over to any program you could find in Singapore. Every school’s Executive MBA has a different structure and format--and, for that matter, most schools don’t even accept much in the way of transfer credits. Apart from that issue, do you really want a degree from a Singaporean university or from one of the “transplant” programs from the U.K. or Australia that have sprung up there? Do you want to have to start at the beginning again in a new program in any case?
You could of course wait until you get transferred back to the U.S. to pick up your education once more, but that’s going to be a while and it’s not guaranteed that you’ll end up back in Hartford when you do return. If you had chosen Purdue’s Executive MBA program, however, you would simply have flown to Purdue once every six months or so from Singapore instead of from Hartford, and never missed a beat in earning your degree. Ask John Green, who’s the individual just described and who’s a 2001 graduate of the program. He moved, took his new job in Singapore, and timed his home leaves to the U.S. to coincide with his Purdue MBA residencies. Says John: “My degree would have been delayed by at least a year had it not been for Purdue’s modular program and flexible structure.”
The same set of circumstances, albeit with somewhat shorter distances involved, would apply to someone who began an Executive MBA program in, say, Minneapolis and got sent by their company to San Francisco or Dallas part way through. The ease with which these sorts of geographical career moves can be accommodated without interrupting one’s education and also without giving up the benefits of live class sessions and face-to-face interactions with fellow students is a major advantage when you’re “learning at a distance” in the Purdue manner.
Purdue is not the only institution that offers this sort of opportunity, but it was the first to do so and its program consistently shows up in the top 20 in the Executive MBA rankings by Business Week, U.S. News and World Report, and The Financial Times. Among the emulators of the Purdue approach are several of the recently-created collaborative Executive MBA programs that are being offered by consortia of European and U.S. business schools. The Trium Global EMBA program involving New York University, the London School of Economics, and HEC in Paris is one of these. Purdue has its own transcontinental variant, the IMM (for International Master’s in Management) Program that includes business school partners--and residencies--in the Netherlands, Germany, and Hungary.
The educational “business model” in question therefore is both flexible and extendible. We believe it brings together the best executive mba training, organized around case analyses and class discussion, and the enhancements offered by distance learning technology and the Internet. The potential--and actual--student audience is, quite literally, a worldwide one. As, these days, it needs to be.