Amid 1999’s white-hot tech market, the University of Baltimore launched its WebMBA program to offer business degrees over the Internet. Barry Brownstein, the program’s director, recently discussed the school’s philosophy, the impact of the tech market’s decline and the pros and cons of an online education.
Have applications for the program declined as the tech market has cooled?
No, actually, it’s still growing. The demand for online education is still growing chiefly because of the convenience factor.
You started in 1999 and every year it’s gone up?
We started with six students in the first class. We have close to 200 students in there now. It’s a two-year program. Students can finish in less time; it depends on their bachelor’s degree background. Our first graduating class was in January 2001.
Do most of the people who take the program go into the technology field?
No, in fact, most of them stay in the area that they come into the program with. Most of our students have a considerable professional background before they enter the program. Many of them don’t even change jobs. They are looking to be promoted.
Seems like a lot of an MBA program is about networking. It’s about meeting your fellow students and then using those contacts later on.
Yeah, good point.
Is that something that these students miss out on?
No. Here’s a big misconception about online programs. To be sure, some schools are set up as isolated, sort-of correspondence courses, and you would think that there wasn’t any socialization. UB is not set up that way. We have designed the WebMBA to actually increase socialization over the classroom. We have what’s called a forum. It’s designed to substitute for the classroom. Students interact all week on the forum, responding to each other’s postings.
For instance, in the class that I teach, I post questions at the start of each week that are based upon the readings for that week. The students take a first crack at the questions on Monday and then Tuesday through Friday they challenge each other’s answers. Over those four or five days, there is a social process by which they learn. Learning is far more powerful if you figure something out for yourself.
People build lifelong friendships. They are taking course after course, and they’re talking to each other four or five days each week for two years. There’s a lot of networking going on. Students sometimes complain that these courses can be more time consuming to take than courses in the classroom.
Are they also more time consuming to teach?
Absolutely. I tell new faculty that are going to be teaching on the Net for the first time that a course on the Net will take two to three times the hours that you spend teaching a course in the classroom. It’s very time consuming. Nobody has quite figured out yet how to do it right. A good analogy that I like to tell people is that when we switched over to television from radio, the first television ads were somebody standing in front of a microphone reading copy. They could only conceive how they did it in the old medium. We’re still at this stage. It’s a young technology, and we’re still trying to figure out the optimal pedagogy. Both students and faculty are pioneers here.
Are issues of respect also a problem? Correspondence schools have been around for a while but they typically aren’t very prestigious.
Students are pleasantly surprised to find that there is this rich social learning. There are some students, though, that sign up for a course on the Web because they think they don’t have the time for the classroom. They find out that’s a big error. The classes on the Net take at least as much time if not more time. The big difference is that you can do it at your own convenience, but it’s not a time saver.
Have you tailored the classes to be more technological? Do you offer classes on the “wired economy” because of the medium?
Yes. There are several classes that are only taught online that are more focused on e-commerce and such. Students can take full advantage of that online. But, typically, I’d say that no higher a percentage of students online are in the field of technology.
Do students pay a lower tuition to take the online program?
No, the tuition is the same.
But doesn’t UB have a lower overhead?
No, because the platform to deliver the courses is an added cost that we don’t have in the classroom. Our platform is something called Prometheus, and it costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Plus, our classes are typically smaller online. With that smaller class size, faculty don’t go as far, so those costs are higher.
Is UB losing money on the program?
No, it’s not a money loser, but given those costs, it’s not something that’s bringing in tons of money for the school either.
