Chapter Six
Faculty and Students
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Professional Academics and Professional Business
People
Who are the faculty? In general, the
faculty teaching courses in an online MBA program are either full-time
or part-time. The part-timers are typically referred to as
non-tenure-track adjuncts, and they may teach for multiple online
institutions on a part-time basis and only in the online mode. Full-time
faculty members are typically on a tenure track, or already tenured, and
they more than likely teach at only one institution on a full-time
basis, and often in both traditional face-to-face classes and in online
courses.
Tenure is a system whereby faculty can obtain lifetime job security by
passing a long-term evaluation period in which they must demonstrate
academic achievement, typically through publishing research and
contributing substantially to a body of knowledge.
An
adjunct faculty member is a part-time teaching employee. In online MBA
programs, an adjunct may hold a full-time teaching position at another
institution, or they may hold a full-time management-level position with
a corporation. Some adjuncts teach part-time for multiple institutions.
AACSB categorizes faculty as being either academically qualified,
meaning he or she has earned at least a doctorate and is specialized in
a particular field of study, or professionally qualified, meaning he or
she has earned at least a Master’s degree and is specialized in a
particular field of study. AACSB qualifications require that at least 50
percent of faculty in the business schools it accredits be academically
qualified. Additionally, AACSB-accredited business schools are required
to demonstrate that their faculty are current in their fields and
capable of delivering the education they profess to teach in their
courses. According to Jerry Trapnell, AACSB’s chief accreditation
officer, “faculty must maintain their currency by their research,
consulting, and/or appropriate professional development activities. Just
because you have a doctorate does not mean you are current in your
field.” So, basically, any AACSB-accredited program is expected to have
qualified faculty who are up to date with today’s business practices.
Otherwise, the program could lose its professional accreditation status.
Professional Academics and Professional Business People
When it comes to discussions about MBA faculty, there are basically two
points of view. There are programs that use a good number of part-time
adjuncts, such as the University of Phoenix, and some of the other
so-called “for-profits.” These institutions are proud of the fact that
their faculty are primarily business practitioners. This means that they
are professionals who are currently working in the business world and
enjoy sharing their real-world business acumen with students in their
online courses. Then there are the programs that use primarily full-time
faculty, such as Arizona State University, Florida State University, and
the many other traditional, not-for-profit institutions. They are proud
of the fact that their faculty are contributing to the overall knowledge
base in their areas of specialization through their academic research
(they have to publish their research to reach tenure) and possibly have
consulting contracts with major corporations.
Perhaps the ideal faculty member is one who is both a successful
academic researcher and theorist and a knowledgeable real-world
practitioner.
Digging Up Information
About Faculty
How
do you find information about what kind of faculty teach in any online
MBA program you are considering? In many cases, you will be hard pressed
to find decent faculty bios on any online MBA website. So, what’s the
next best thing? Call or e-mail the program director, introduce yourself
and say you are very interested in enrolling in their online MBA program
and that you would like to have more information about the faculty who
teach online. Here’s a short list of questions you can ask:
• If the school has a
full-time MBA program, do the same faculty teach in the online program?
• What percentage of
faculty are part-time adjuncts? What percentage are full-time faculty?
How many have doctorates?
• Can you provide a
list of faculty and links to their resumes or bios that may be on your
institution’s website? Or, can you e-mail the curriculum vitas of your
online faculty members?
• Are there any
faculty in your program who are conducting specialized research and are
thus contributing knowledge to the field? If yes, can you point me to
whatever they may have gotten published?
• Can you provide
information about where some of your faculty might be employed (if
practitioners)?
If
you have the names of faculty teaching in an online MBA program and you
can’t find information about them on the program’s web pages, try going
to the main home page of the institution and entering their names into
the home page’s search box. Sometimes this will take you to links of
faculty members’ personal websites that show their curriculum vitas, mug
shots, and more.
A
curriculum vita is similar to a resume in that it lists a person’s
employment history and education. In higher education, it is usually a
much longer document that also includes a faculty member’s full
publishing history, professional memberships, special recognition and
awards, and other biographical information.
Pedagogy is frequently
brought up when talking about faculty. It basically refers to the
science and art of teaching. For example, one form of effective pedagogy
in an online MBA program could be a teacher’s utilization of
competency-based assessments, whereby students are tested on their
ability to make certain business-related decisions. Another form of
pedagogy would be the case-study method of teaching and learning, where
students review documented simulations of real business problems and
challenges and then discuss and present relevant business-solution
strategies. See Chapter Ten for more information on competency-based
learning and case studies.
The
ironic thing about pedagogy is that most higher education faculty
members are not taught pedagogical concepts and theories, except those
who were education majors during their years as students. Most
professors are basically “thrown to the wolves” and learn how to teach
through trial and error. Some professors become very good at teaching
and others do not.
When it comes to online teaching, the same truths apply. Many faculty
are not adequately taught how to teach an online course, which,
obviously, entails a different set of skills than teaching face to face.
That is why it is very important that any business school providing an
online MBA has a strong online teacher support system in place that
trains teachers how to effectively teach online.
Training Teachers How to
Teach Online
So
one more question you might want to ask is what kind of infrastructure
is in place for supporting faculty who teach online? Some business
schools are still trying to find their way with regard to providing
adequate support for online faculty. However, most business schools that
teach in the online environment have sophisticated and efficient
teaching, learning, and technology centers that provide the necessary
support and expertise for helping faculty build and teach online
courses. For example, Florida State University, which launched its first
online MBA program in the fall of 2004, has an Office of Distributed and
Distance Learning that supports FSU’s College of Business by providing
faculty with online class design support and a continuously updated
series of live workshops for faculty to learn how to effectively use
such educational technologies as online discussion forums, PowerPoint
lectures, and electronic testing and grading functions. See Chapter Nine
for a much more detailed discussion about how educational technologies
are utilized in online teaching and learning. Also look at Chapter Ten
for information about how faculty use a variety of teaching and learning
styles in online MBA programs.
Unfortunately, there’s really no sure-fire way to discover whether an
online MBA program is doing a good job of training its faculty how to
teach online. The only thing you can do is ask the program
administrators and try to make an educated guess based on the response
you may get. Short answers such as “we provide a five-week training
period for all our faculty before they teach online,” might tell you
something negative. A more thorough answer that explains how an
institution teaches online-related pedagogies and how it helps faculty
incorporate effective learning technologies into its overall curriculum
might tell you something positive. In the end, however, you are really
not going to know how good the faculty are until you actually sit
through an online course and interact with them.
“There will always be a range of professors,” said Paula O’Callaghan,
former director of the iMBA Program at Syracuse University. “The core in
the middle will be very good and very responsive. There will be some
professors who have high expectations, and you will struggle to meet
them, and there will be a few who might not meet your expectations. You
can’t expect that it will be all that different from what you
experienced as an undergraduate.”
The
next part of your homework entails finding out what kind of students
enroll in the programs you are investigating. This investigative
assignment is just as important, if not more important, than all the
other steps I have thus far suggested you take when searching for the
right online MBA program.
Inside Chapter Nineteen, you’ll find some very interesting profiles of
online MBA students. One thing they all have in common is that they are
busy, working adult professionals in their late 20s to late 40s, and
most have Type A personalities. These are the kind of students you will
be interacting with throughout your educational experience and very
possibly after you graduate if you form some meaningful bonds with
fellow students, which is actually not uncommon in the online
environment. The other part of the student equation is the networking
angle, which is discussed in Chapter Seventeen. The students you meet
online can indeed become an important part of your business network
during and after the program, just like they would in any traditional
face-to-face MBA program.
What’s great about online learning is that it brings out the voices of
those people who might normally sit in the back of a face-to-face class
and say nothing. People who are shy in a physical social environment are
known to open up and contribute valuable information and readily share
their work experiences in an online course. Plus, it is hard to hide in
an online course. There’s basically no back of the class. Online MBA
students are almost always partially graded on their ability to post
significant comments to online discussions, and they are frequently put
into teams that work on projects together as part of their course
requirements and grades.
Especially if you enroll in what’s called a lock-step cohort program,
you’ll want to find out as much information as possible about fellow
students. A lock-step cohort online MBA program is one in which a group
of students are enrolled in a program and all take the same predefined
courses together and in the same sequence as strictly outlined by the
school (see Chapter Eight).
So,
in short, because you’ll be interacting with these people for the
duration of your MBA education, you’ll want to get a sense of who they
are before you enroll, which, by the way, is not the easiest task in the
world. Because of privacy rules and regulations that institutions must
honor with regard to providing information about any students, you won’t
be able to get any detailed information about a particular cohort before
you enroll. However, an academic advisor should be able to give you a
generic sense of what kind of students you will be working and studying
with, including what kind of occupations they may hold, without naming
names.
“Sometimes I found my classmates to be tiresome, but then I reminded
myself that everyone is different and with a little effort I could find
something interesting in every one of them; and, I could grow and expand
my own awareness if I just tried to meet everyone halfway,” said Regis
University online MBA graduate Katherine Porter
“Just like a regular face-to-face group, the more you work with people,
the more you come to know what they are really good at and what they are
not so good at, and you divvy up responsibility accordingly,” said Dawn
McAvoy, online MBA student, East Carolina University.
“One of the greatest indicators of student satisfaction revolves around
how well people enjoy working and studying with the people in their
program,” said Daphne Atkinson, vice president, industry relations,
Graduate Management Admission Council. “Part of an MBA education is
faculty-driven, but the other piece is actually peer-learning driven. So
you really want the people in your virtual class to be people that you
feel you can learn from and to whom you can contribute learning based on
your background and experience.”
Of
course, you can always start by looking at information about students
that might be available on a program’s website. Syracuse University’s
iMBA program, for instance, features current student and alumni profiles
at
http://whitman.syr.edu/MBA/iMBA/Community/.
Not all online MBA programs supply this kind of relevant information
about students on their websites. Why you may ask? Because they simply
haven’t got their act together when it comes to developing websites with
relevant information. Nonetheless, I must add that having a website
that’s lacking the appropriate amount of informational content does not
necessarily mean that an institution has lower-quality faculty and/or
students. If you ask a program administrator for information about
students, they will give you whatever they can dig up for you,
regardless of whether it happens to be posted on their website.
Tips for Learning About
Students
There are at least four more things you can do to enlighten yourself
about the makeup of any online MBA program’s student body:
1.
Look at admission requirements. The criteria students must meet to be
accepted into an online MBA program can, indeed, tell you something
about your future online colleagues. At the University of Florida, for
instance, admission is highly selective and based on students
demonstrating high performance in academic ability (average of a 3.3 GPA
and a score of 655 on the GMAT), professional experience (at least two
years of full-time post-baccalaureate work experience and two letters of
reference from current or former supervisors), and personal character
(proof of concept of which is provided through written essays and an
invitation-only personal interview). At the University of Phoenix,
admission requirements include a minimum average GPA of 2.5 and at least
three years of significant work experience. GMAT test scores, essays,
and reference letters are not required for admission to the University
of Phoenix online MBA program.
Overall you’ll hear differing points of view regarding admission
requirements and selectivity processes and how these all relate to what
a student body comes to represent in any particular online MBA program.
Stiff academic requirements do indicate that students in the program are
typically conscientious, hard working, and dependable classmates who
contribute vast energy and knowledge to the online learning environment.
Students in other programs, who are not good test takers and wouldn’t
come close to meeting stringent admission requirements because they have
been out of school for many years, typically have more than enough
practical, real-life working experience and knowledge to contribute
sound and useful information to any online course. Regardless, in most
online learning environments, the slackers and non-contributors will
more than likely drop out in due time.
2.
Try to find out where the students live and work. Most online MBA
programs show that the majority of their students live and work in areas
relatively close to the physical campus. However, there is also the
reverse of this trend, with students living as far away as another
country that is across an ocean.
3.
Ask about student surveys. Most online MBA programs regularly conduct
student surveys in which students are asked a series of questions about
their work habits, online learning skills, professional working skills,
satisfaction levels, and the overall efficiency of their online learning
experiences. Often the results of such surveys are aggregated into
internal reports not for public consumption. However, you can ask an
academic advisor to give you a sense of such survey results that could
help paint a picture of its students typical working and learning
behaviors.
4.
Ask whether you can communicate with some students and/or alumni. When
talking to advisors and other administrators of the programs you are
investigating, just come right out and ask them whether they have any
students or alumni who are willing to share their phone numbers and
e-mail addresses with prospective students such as yourself. You may be
surprised to know that they do, in fact, have such contacts. Plus, many
online programs have alumni services just the same as they do for
on-campus students. So you can always contact a school’s alumni
department and ask if they can connect you with any online graduates.
The problem with this, of course, is that the institution’s contact list
is always full of very positive ambassadors. However, if you can form a
short and friendly relationship with such contacts, you can get them to
open up more about any of the negative aspects of their online learning
experiences. My advice in these kinds of situations is to be friendly,
thankful, very polite and humble, and ask a lot of questions until you
feel you have gotten the right answers and lots of good information.
So,
with a little homework on your part and a willingness to ask a lot of
questions, you should be able to dig up some relevant information about
the students you will be interacting with on a regular basis and getting
to know quite well during your graduate school experience. Nonetheless,
you really won’t get to know your colleagues until you actually start
learning and working with them. As you go along through trial and error
you’ll pick and choose interactions with those students whom you
communicate most effectively with.
According to AACSB accreditation standards, online learning programs raise questions about the opportunities students actually have for the right kinds of interaction among each other, as well as the interactions they have with faculty, and “the school will have the burden of demonstrating that it provides significant interaction opportunities.” Because online courses do have the unique feature of being able to capture electronically all the student-to-student and student-to-faculty interchanges that have occurred over time, the administrators of such programs should be able to give you a pretty good historic sense of what their online student body is really like, as well as how well their faculty have been doing in this relatively new form of teaching and learning. Again, you’ll have to listen carefully and try to make an educated guess based on the responses you may get.
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