BABSON COLLEGE MBA PROGRAM BUILDS COMMUNITY

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January 2002, Vol. 1, Issue 1

BABSON COLLEGE MBA PROGRAM BUILDS COMMUNITY

The F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, which has been ranked #1 in entrepreneurship by U.S. News and World Report for seven consecutive years, can also be given kudos for its first successful hybrid (face-to-face and Internet-based) MBA program, called the Babson/Intel MBA. Launched in the summer of 2001, the Babson/Intel MBA is a 27-month program that currently enrolls 32 Intel employees/graduate students. The full tuition per student is $52,500 pre-paid by Intel in four installments.

The college’s Babson Interactive unit, which was formed during the fall of 2000, designs, develops and delivers the custom MBA program tailored to Intel’s learning objectives, which are divided into four primary modules titled Introduction/Opportunity Recognition, Opportunity Assessment, Managing and Sustaining a Business, and Managing Growth in an Uncertain Environment.

Plans are to develop similar hybrid models for other corporations, says Babson Interactive’s Chief Technology Officer Stephen Laster. "Our approach at Babson has always been that we are good at delivering learning to people based on what they need, so we are just extending that process into e-learning."

Laster adds that Babson’s graduate school transformed its traditional teaching methods into more of a "modular, integrated fashion" during the late 1980s and early 1990s, thus making for a "natural extension" into e-learning. "We had content set up to be taught in an integrated fashion.

So the real challenge was how do we understand these delivery technologies and leverage them in a fashion so we can create high-caliber learning experiences like we do in the classroom."

The end result is the hybrid model. Each month the Intel students, who come from all over the country, meet face-to-face with each other and Babson professors on a Thursday afternoon through Saturday evening at one of three Intel locations (Portland, Santa Clara or Phoenix) or at the Babson campus. The rest of the program is done online in various forms, including team projects, in partnership with Cenquest, who provides digital content development and technology infrastructure services.

"A key part of business education takes place in community building," says Laster. "So there are some topics, even with the state of the art the way it is today, where you need to get shoulder-to-shoulder from time to time.

"We are now developing other products and talking to other corporate clients about how we can service them," he continues. "We are working right now on a corporate entrepreneurship series of titles that would be more certificate-based, not degree-based."

Babson/Intel MBA Program

Cenquest

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