‘Blended approach extends reach’ by Delia Bradshaw, FT.com, March 2011

This article is quite short but is revealing about the extent to which business schools are embracing on-line learning in their programmes. It starts by claiming that the last twelve months have seen major developments in the use of learning technology at Business Schools. However the extent to which this is progress compared to the activities of major companies is questioned by the follow up statement that business schools are beginning to embrace ‘blended learning’, combining face to face and virtual technology. If this really is a new development it is at least ten years behind the practice in many forward thinking companies.

The example quoted is a joint programme between Brown University and Spain’s IE school and the Dean of the latter makes a perceptive point about the benefits of virtual sessions run by an online facilitator with typed in chat by participants. He says that ‘everybody participates, even the shy people; you think twice as hard about writing something as you do about saying it in the classroom’. This is a benefit of live virtual sessions that can easily be overlooked. However prospective students might be put off by the $95000 fee that is quoted for this 15 month programme; it makes our University tuition fees a bargain by comparison!

There is also mention of Ashridge’s progress in the blended learning area, though we would question the quoted benefit of being able to reduce cost by recycling recorded video lectures; our experience is that this is of limited value as it loses the benefit of genuine interaction and learner focus. They do however make the valid point that the recent improvements in bandwidth have widened the scope of what can be delivered virtually, even though there are still some parts of the world that lag behind.

An example from Queen’s school in Canada makes one wonder if the business schools have really seized the full potential of the technology. Apparently they have been running a ‘video conferencing MBA’ for a decade and have seized upon the new technology as an opportunity for the same content to be covered at students’ desks, rather than travelling to a video conferencing centre. But there is no mention of the opportunity for interactivity which is what really makes virtual learning come alive; watching and listening to a business school professor on a screen is not, on its own, the most effective form of learning.

The article is interesting but it is difficult to assess whether the sample of schools quoted is in any way typical of business schools as a whole. It would have been good to hear for instance what Harvard, LBS and INSEAD are doing; I suspect that they would be much further down the road and more in line with the practice that we see in top companies.

Click here to read the article in full:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/53a0a23e-4b71-11e0-89d8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1LZYn2ask