by George Lorenzo

Some time ago I attended a face-to-face information session for an executive MBA (EMBA) program. This particular EMBA was scheduled over four semesters and consisted of two day-long classes held Fridays and Saturdays on alternating weekends, two full weeks of face-to-face classes held in the summer, plus one full week of an international residency. The entire curriculum had its share of educational technologies for conducting work in between all of the face-to-face sessions.
 
The prospective students at the information session were all, as expected, busy, hard-working professionals from a wide variety of industries. During a Q and A period, one prospective student mentioned that he traveled quite frequently at his job and had a family with two young children. He wanted to know what would happen if he missed a couple Friday-Saturday classes. He got a polite response from a program administrator who indicated that EMBA students are expected to be committed to attending every face-to-face class unless there was some dire emergency that prevented them to do so.

As I was leaving the information session, I overheard two prospective students talking about how they didn’t think their employers would allow them to physically miss coming to work on so many Fridays or even Saturdays, thus preventing them from possibly enrolling in the EMBA program.

The point I am trying to make is that I think both students and EMBA programs lose out when schools of business refuse to convert more of their face-to-face classes to a fully online modality. In short, lessening the number of face-to-face classes, but not totally eliminating them because they are, in fact, beneficial to students in any EMBA program, could mean more enrollments.

Apparently there is one school of business that agrees with this notion - the School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas offers a blended Global Leadership Executive MBA Program (GLEMBA) that requires its students to meet face-to-face for only six weekends (once each quarter), that it calls “retreats” (Thursday through Saturday), over a period of 28 months, plus it holds one week-long international residency that it calls a “study tour”. (See http://som.utdallas.edu/online_mba/glemba/glemba_key.htm for information about how GLEMBA compares itself to a typical weekend EMBA program.)

GLEMBA is “a very rigorous international program,” says Associate Director Johnathan Hochberg. “When we talk to students about why they chose our program, there are two factors that distinguish us. One is the flexibility of our delivery model. Most executive MBAs have an every other weekend format and working professionals can’t commit to that because they typically travel a lot and have family obligations on weekends. The other is the international focus of our program. They realize that they need this kind of expertise.”
Hochberg adds that he believes there are few people willing to take an EMBA program fully online. “People need the human interaction, they want to meet with people; they want to know who their instructors are; they want to meet their colleagues. We found that the once-per-quarter model works pretty well.”

The University of Texas at Dallas GLEMBA has been in existence since the late 1990s. Each year it takes in about 35 to 40 students, with two intakes of about 20 students each in January and in August. “We purposely cap the amount of students we take in each year,” says Hochberg.

The flexible format has been working well, resulting in the recent launch of two new similarly formatted six-month, 15-credit, graduate-level certificate programs, one in Global Strategy and another in Global Operations. As noted on the University of Texas at Dallas School of Management website, these two programs feature “courses, seminars and workshops that are initiated and concluded during two, three day weekend (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) retreat sessions in January and June. In the interim, the delivery and academic exchanges are facilitated using online technologies and teleconferencing.”

According to Hochberg, these types of programs are filling a need for professionals to gain necessary international business knowledge and competencies quickly through a more flexible blended delivery model.

GLEMBA
http://som.utdallas.edu/online_mba/glemba/glemba_welcome.htm

Graduate Certificate in Global Strategy
http://som.utdallas.edu/online_mba/glemba/glemba_certificate_gbl_ strategy.htm

Graduate Certificate in Global Operations
http://som.utdallas.edu/online_mba/glemba/glemba_certificate_gbl_ operations.htm