Chapter Ten
Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes
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Other Competency-Base Teaching and Learning Styles
All these fascinating educational technologies in online MBA programs
are really secondary to what should be foremost on your mind, which is
what am I going to learn? What kind of skills will I have when I
graduate? How can I apply what I am learning to my job and to my
career-advancement goals? A course with all the latest technological
bells and whistles is really no course at all if the eventual outcome is
that your are no more knowledgeable than when you started. You will,
however, definitely be poorer after you have paid your tuition,
regardless of what you may or may not have learned.
Hence, this chapter is all about what online MBA teaching techniques and
structures are the most effective for facilitating learning and gaining
managerial skills, as well as how you might spot a school’s ability to
meet its mission to teach you the right stuff.
Competency-based learning and
learning outcomes are two terms you may run across as you search for
the right online MBA program. Both are particularly useful practices because each deals with the connection between the
academic content
of a curriculum and what a student has learned or can demonstrate as a
skill.
Competency-based learning is an education practice that measures and
demonstrates what a student is capable of accomplishing as a result of
what he or she has learned. Related to competency-based learning are
learning outcomes, which are the clearly stated capabilities or desired
results of a learning experience.
AACSB addresses what it calls the “assurance of learning standards” in
its documentation of “Eligibility Procedures and Accreditation Standards
for Business Accreditation,” stating that business schools should have
“well-documented systematic processes to develop, monitor, evaluate, and
revise the substance and delivery of curricula of degree programs and
assess the impact of the curricula on learning.” Additionally, AACSB
identifies three broad capacities that students should develop at the
Master’s level:
• “Capacity to
lead in organizational situations.
• Capacity to
apply knowledge in new and unfamiliar circumstances through a conceptual
understanding of relevant disciplines.
• Capacity to
adapt and innovate to solve problems, to cope with unforeseen events,
and to manage in unpredictable environments.”
The
Council for Higher Education Accreditation also addresses the topic of
learning outcomes, stating in its publication “Accreditation and
Assuring Quality in Distance Learning” that over the past 10 years
accreditation standards, in general, have changed to having a stronger
focus on student achievement and that institutions are required to
document their effectiveness in “meeting their educational mission and
goals and that student outcomes are at an acceptable level.”
Competency-based learning and learning outcomes emphasize practical
knowledge that MBA students can apply to their work immediately. An
example might be an accounting course where a student must demonstrate
his or her ability to post a double-entry bookkeeping ledger, which, in
essence, is a visible manifestation of knowledge gained. Another example
might be based on a case-study teaching and learning method where a team
of students analyzes a business challenge and comes up with a solution
that includes a business and marketing plan that requires them to create
a detailed financial section with spreadsheets showing income and
cash-flow forecasts. How case studies are used in online courses is
explained later in this chapter.
So,
in general, how are schools building their curriculums to measure up to
these kinds of standards? At Capella University, for instance, the
entire online MBA curriculum has been converted to a competency-based
learning environment. The same holds true for the University of Phoenix,
which has a highly structured program that clearly states what MBA
students will learn and how they will be continuously assessed on
whether certain skill levels have been achieved as they move through
each of their courses.
“We want to make sure MBA learners leave our program and then go back to
the job and immediately have an impact,” said Barbara Butts Williams,
faculty director of Capella University’s Online MBA program. “We try to
build our projects around relevant problems that they can solve
immediately.”
At
Capella University, part of the focus on competencies and learning
outcomes revolves around an innovative Professional Effectiveness
Coaching Core. In addition to a business core, where students take core
required courses, and a professional effectiveness core, where students
study the best practices of effective management, Capella fosters a
professional coaching environment geared toward applying what students
learn in their courses to their jobs. The way it works is that students
have the option of choosing a professional business coach who has been
hired by Capella to provide objective one-on-one guidance to MBA
students with relation to applying new behaviors on their jobs and
helping them develop and implement plans to achieve career goals.
Capella students choose coaches by reviewing a list of coach bios and
listening to audiotaped perspectives from the coaches online. The
student then identifies his or her top three coach preferences, and
based on the coach’s load of students, a selection is made and then
confirmed with the MBA student. The coach and the MBA student then
establish an agreement for how they will work together, with the
relationship intended to last as long as the student is actively
enrolled in the program. According to Williams, “the intent of the
personal coaching relationship is to help learners stretch their skills
in key areas of performance improvement and apply what they learn right
away, so they can demonstrate an impact on results within their
organizations and help reposition themselves for success.”
At
the University of Phoenix, online MBA students follow a straightforward
course design that begins by clearly stating what the learning
objectives are during each week of any given course within the program.
The learning objectives align with a popular educational classification
system commonly known by academics as Bloom’s taxonomy, which has its
roots in research conducted back in the 1950s by former University of
Chicago Professor of Education Benjamin Bloom. Bloom identified six
levels of learning: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis,
synthesis, and evaluation. Bloom’s taxonomy has since been posthumously
expanded and revised by numerous education professionals. At the
University of Phoenix, it has helped faculty and instructional designers
align learning objectives, course exercises, and course testing
requirements in a way that allows online MBA students to demonstrate
that they have mastered more than 50 business-related competencies.
Basically, competencies are reached through critical readings and
exercises, including interacting with peers in discussion boards, and
then the students are assessed through quizzes and examinations. An
exercise within a course will have instructions that use verbs that fall
within the six levels of learning identified by Bloom - knowledge,
comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
So,
for example, a student or team of students may be required to analyze,
understand, synthesize, evaluate, apply, create, and develop a marketing
plan based on one or more case studies and a required set of readings.
Before, during, and after students work on their exercises and tests,
they are required to discuss their work with their peers and faculty
inside the course discussion board, where learning takes place from
student to student and from faculty to student.
Online MBA students at the University of Phoenix are also able to see
precisely what they should be able to accomplish within any course in
the program through a relatively new online information service called
Program Maps.
Program Maps are based on areas of learning called domains. Within each domain are subcategories of learning. Under each subcategory is a description of what is required of the student in a particular course inside a particular area of learning. So, for instance, a student can click on the Business Planning and Development domain and see a flowchart showing the following three subcategories within that domain: Strategic Planning, Marketing, and Business Research. When the student clicks on Strategic Planning, a description of what is required within a specific module of a specific course pops up. In this case, it’s from week six of an economics course, and the result of the Program Map reveals that the student “will analyze a product or service offered by an organization and the market in which it competes, explore relevant forecasts, and recommend non-pricing strategies to enhance sales.”
For
that final, all-important piece of the class - earning a grade - faculty
will gauge how much a student learns and put a grade on a student’s
assignment within a course by using what’s commonly referred to in
online teaching parlance as a grading rubric, an example of which, from
a University of Phoenix accounting course, is shown below:
Other
Competency-Based Teaching and Learning Styles
Examination and analysis of business case studies is another prevalent
teaching and learning style that helps online MBA students develop the
practical skills they need to become successful business managers.
Virtual team projects is another important teaching and learning method
used in online MBA curriculums. Both methods are geared toward building
competencies that are aligned with learning objectives and outcomes.
What academics call case-based teaching has historically been an
effective way for MBA students to participate in true-to-life
simulations of a wide variety of business practices. A case study is
usually a nonfictional story of about 10 to 30 pages in length written
by a professional case writer who outlines all the details of a specific
business situation, such as how company X faced the challenge of
building a customer service department, or how company Y created an
advertising campaign. Other cases are more holistic and might explore
how a company rose to prominence within a certain sector, and how senior
management faced a wide variety of challenges during its early growth
phase.
The
most well-known publisher of case studies is the Harvard Business
School, which, as stated on its website, believes that “the case method
is by far the most powerful way to learn the skills required to manage,
and to lead.” Other well-known publishers of case studies include Babson
College, Darden Business Publishing, Stanford Graduate School of
Business, Thunderbird’s American Graduate School of Business Education,
and many others.
In
some online MBA programs, students are supplied with digital versions of
such case studies, supplied through a company called Xanedu. Xanedu
aggregates and supplies copyright-cleared case studies from all the
major case-study publishers, as well as other business-related articles
from numerous newspapers and magazines through a partnership it has with
the ProQuest online information service, into a web-based interface.
Faculty members or course developers go into the Xanedu web-based
system, search for relevant case studies and articles they want their
students to read and analyze, and, with the click of a mouse, create
what’s called a Course Pack of these preselected materials for students
to access inside their online course modules.
Students are instructed to carefully review these materials and are
asked a series of related questions by the professor inside the course’s
asynchronous discussion board. The students are asked what they would do
in the situation or situations provided in the case study. They might
also be given a variety of decisions to choose from and defend. Based on
their answers, students can be divided into teams that must defend their
positions through presentations and interactions with the rest of their
classmates.
Working together as a group on a specific project is not uncommon in the
business world, and therefore many online MBA programs have a strong
emphasis on team-based learning assignments that often involve case
studies. The course management system will have online tools that help
to facilitate team projects online, such as private virtual rooms where
team members can exchange files and communicate with each other both
asynchronously and synchronously. Frequently team members will also be
required to communicate by telephone at times during the process.
Typically a team project concludes with a presentation or paper that the
team has jointly created. Sometimes a team project will take an entire
semester or term. For example, a group of students might work on a
creating a full-blown business plan, or they may be required to write a
research paper on a modern business evolution occurring on an
international scale, culminating in a live face-to-face presentation at
the end of the course (if the program includes a residency requirement).
At Syracuse University, for instance, team project presentations are
held during their last residency requirement, when they also hold final
exams. If the school does not have a residency requirement, such
presentations may be conducted with a web-conferencing tool such as
described in Chapter Nine, or as a PowerPoint presentation with audio
components. Team project presentations are usually evaluated by both
fellow students and the professor, who will give your team a grade based
on the quality and depth of work performed.
Team-based assignments that conclude in a professional presentation
obviously mimic the real world and can therefore easily be considered a
competency-based learning technique based on specific learning
objectives and outcomes.
One of the benefits of working in teams is that the team can establish
great business relationships between students in which individuals bring
out their expertise and share knowledge and practical advice openly,
learning from each other as opposed to learning only from the professor
or the work performed individually. One of the drawbacks of working in teams is that it can establish
dislikes and friction between students, especially in situations where
everyone is not pulling his or her weight equally. Chapter Seventeen
discusses how to survive team projects.
“The main reason why we require team projects is because our
advisory board of business people recommends them,” said Rosemary
Hartigan, professor and director of business and executive programs at
the University of Maryland University College. “We asked business people
what they want MBA students to be capable of doing, and they said that
it is very important that they be able to work in teams.”
The
Infrastructure Supporting Course Development
Now
that you know about the technologies used in online learning (from
Chapter Nine) as well as the competency-based teaching and learning
techniques used in online courses, how do you get an idea about a
program’s ability to build and actually integrate the technology,
teaching and learning in an effective manner?
One
way is to try to get a sense for how an online MBA program is supported
by the institution. Does the program, for instance, have a teaching,
learning, and technology staff, similar to what I mentioned in Chapter
Nine, actively assisting its faculty with the design and implementation
of effective competency-based learning environments? Or are faculty more
or less left on their own?
When you are talking to online MBA program administrators, simply ask
them about the nature of their educational technology and online
teaching support systems. Do they have a team of instructional designers
who regularly assist faculty with course development? What kind of
background and experience do their instructional designers have? Ask
whether you can talk to their chief educational technology person to get
a better sense for what their courses are like and whether their courses
have incorporated competency-based elements. Again, you’ll have to make
a judgment call based on the response you get. A bit of frustration and
hesitancy coming through the phone, or a sound bite that overly
resembles an advertisement, may be a clue that the program is simply an
online version of a boring experience.
“A
lot of the best programs are at schools that have a very strong
instructional design or educational technology department on campus. It
informs the way they are able to create effective courses,” said Emily
Thompson, assistant director, W.P. Carey MBA - Online Program at Arizona
State University.
For
the most part, institutions that have a history of offering online
degree programs also have adequate online education support
infrastructures. Some of the more established providers of online MBA
programs, such as the University of Maryland University College, Regis
University, Athabasca University, the University of Florida, and Indiana
University, have built efficient teaching, learning, and technology
centers that have gone through the trial-and-error processes that are
typically part and parcel of an institution’s ability to provide
effective online programs.
This does not mean, however, that smaller institutions are not capable
of creating academically sound online learning environments. For
example, Marist College, a relatively small AACSB-accredited private,
nonprofit school in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the first college in New
York State to gain approval to offer its entire MBA program online, is
steeped in a unique collaborative culture known for its community
building and personalized services. Marist has figured out how to
transfer that culture to the online modality.
“Small colleges might have a unique advantage in the type of culture
that they have and how they can replicate that culture in an online
world,” said Tina Royal, director of technology training, Marist College
Basically the amount of knowledge and skills acquired in an online program should be no different from what’s provided in its equivalent on-campus MBA program. “Online learning gives people a new approach or new modality (for teaching and learning), but it does not necessarily mean that the quality of the educational process is going to be anything less,” added Royal.
Keep that quality factor in mind at all times as you go through the decision-making process of where you want to earn your MBA degree.
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