Chapter Seven
Student Service and Value
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Every institution has a set of on-campus customer services it offers to its students through various offices and departments, ranging from the financial aid and registrar’s offices to dormitory residencies and a campus infirmary. This chapter covers those services important to online learners, such as enrollment and registration services, academic advising, the library and bookstore, technical support, and much more.
Student services is a term used by higher-education institutions that
covers a lot of ground. It relates to all those offices and services one
would expect to find on any real campus, such as admissions and
financial aid, the registrar, the library, health services, athletics,
student clubs and organizations, alumni services, job and career
services, academic advising, tutoring services, food and beverage
services, residential services, and even recreational and entertainment
services that an on-campus student would typically find at the student
union. Many, but not all, of these services can be and are provided to
online students. In particular, today it is not unusual for students to
go through the admissions, financial aid, and registration processes
almost entirely online.
Capella University is a good example of an institution that has
developed a sophisticated online admissions process that allows
prospective students to apply and track the application process with
relative ease, all online. In addition to being able to complete all the
necessary admissions forms online, prospective students can enter into
live discussions with enrollment counselors in an online chat or through
a toll-free phone service as they are filling out their online
applications. Prospective students can also send their questions about
the application and admissions processes via e-mail.
Regardless of how an institution provides services to its online
learners, you are entitled to the same student services as an on-campus
student. If you were to walk onto the campus of the school you are
attending online, you will, indeed, be able to go to the campus library
and use its services just like any other student; you will be able to
visit any of the aforementioned student services-related offices and
take advantage of any or all of the services they offer their student
body. After all, you are a card-carrying, tuition-paying student, too.
In fact, if you happen to be interested in an online MBA program that
has a physical campus located close to where you live, you could get the
best of both worlds by visiting the campus whenever you desire to take
advantage of the student services provided by the institution. You
could, for example, arrange to meet with your faculty, attend
school-sponsored social events, use the campus library, and attend
graduation ceremonies at commencement time without having to travel a
long distance.
In
the end, you’ll need to judge how thorough, organized, and efficient a
business program handles the services it offers to its online student
population. Just like in business, some programs have a long list of
excellent customer services and others don’t.
Are Student Services Up to Par?
The
Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET), a
organization that is an advocate for effective policies and practices in
support of online teaching and learning, has done extensive research on
the topic of student services for online learners. WCET, whose
membership includes colleges and universities from across the U.S., and
some foreign countries, that offer online degree programs, claims that
many institutions are still struggling with providing the same level of
services for their online students as they do for their on-campus
students. WCET’s research has resulted in a set of guidelines to help
institutions provide student services in an online environment
– a tall task that requires a working collaboration between a
school’s information technology infrastructure and all its many
student-services-oriented departments working in concert with the
business school offering the online MBA program.
WCET explains that all student services can have some online presence.
What this means is that as an online student you should expect a certain
amount of important student services to be provided smoothly over an
Internet connection. Additionally, WCET notes that there should always
be a way to easily connect with a live person who can answer any
questions or concerns you may have via telephone, fax, or other
synchronous methods, such as live chat and instant messaging. Or, if
seeking answers via e-mail, you should get a response within 24 hours.
Depending on the institution, prior to actually going through the
official application and admission process you’ll communicate with the
first level of the school’s advisement staff, who are admissions and
financial-aid counselors. These are the people who will help you with
understanding all the forms you will need to fill out and basically how
to effectively deal with all the bureaucratic red tape you’ll need to go
through to apply for financial assistance. They will also
be able to explain academic requirements, any prerequisite courses you
may need to take to get up to the appropriate academic speed, estimated
timelines to ultimately graduate, and how much hard work and
determination will be required of you, in general, to complete
coursework.
Although these counselors do indeed provide an invaluable service, for
many people the information they provide is really secondary to finding
detailed information about a school’s academic structure. This is where
professional academic advisors come into the picture.
An academic advisor is a professional staff member of an institution
(usually a professor) who has been assigned to assist a certain number
of students with the course selection process and other decision-making
processes concerning one’s academic and professional objectives.
Academic advising is one of the most important student services you can
take advantage of prior to actually going through the application and
admissions process, as well as during your stint as an online student.
After you are accepted into your program of choice, you will be assigned
an official, professional academic advisor, who is usually a professor
or may be a dean or assistant dean. Your academic counselor will be your
friend and mentor throughout your MBA experience.
If
you are really concerned about the academic side of your MBA endeavor,
you’ll want to get in touch with an academic advisor before you go
through the typically cumbersome application, admissions, and
financial-aid processes. Many online MBA program websites list contact
information for academic counselors whom you can talk to by telephone or
communicate with via e-mail. Other programs don’t make academic
counselors so readily available to prospective students who are in the
early phase of the decision-making process but instead have them talk
primarily with their admissions and financial-aid staff, who are, in
many cases, trained professional sales people.
Because some of the most informative advice you can get would typically come from a professional academic advisor, you should simply tell the school you are investigating that you would prefer to speak with a full professor, dean, or program director.
Registration Services
and Student IDs
When you become a bona-fide accepted student in an online MBA program,
you will be able to register and pay for your classes online, and much
more. You’ll be assigned a student ID username and password that gives
you access, through a web-based learner’s portal environment, to a host
of online services that are typical of almost every institution, such as
library services, the online bookstore, online career services,
technical support services, and a wide variety of online study aids and
resources. Chapter Nine discusses how this first phase of the basic
online student infrastructure operates.
I
talk more extensively about what students really need to understand
about library services and conducting research online in Chapter
Eighteen. For now, however, as you are searching for the right online
MBA program, be aware of what kind of online library and research
services will be made available to you from the schools you are
investigating. First of all, the library and research service portion of
your online courses should have an easily accessible and relevant
collection of online materials related to what MBA students read and
study, including business-oriented scholarly journals and other modern
business research databases and resources.
You’ll want to know whether the online library subscribes to a good
supply of business research databases, of which there are many, such as
Bloomberg, Business Source Elite, Gartner Group Reports, Hoover’s
Online, and others. If the school library does not have an extensive
electronic database of online business-related resources, ask whether
they have made interlibrary loan arrangements with other university
libraries.
Finally, in relation to online library services, you’ll want to know
whether the school has a special distance-learning library staff that
works specifically with online students and whether the library provides
any online information literacy/research skills training to its
students. Distance-learning librarians could turn into one of your most
valuable allies. They are typically charged with teaching and guiding
online students how to conduct effective research, and more, through the
many online resources available through an library system’s information
labyrinth. For instance, distance-learning librarians, in addition to
showing online students how to use its electronic reserves, will also
readily provide information about the proper way to write research
papers, how to avoid plagiarism, and how to honor and abide by the
latest copyright laws.
In
addition to obtaining research materials from the online campus library
service, you will be dealing with an online campus bookstore service.
Many institutions partner with an online bookstore solution provider,
such as MBS Direct, which carries a large inventory of textbooks and
other course reading material in both printed and digital form. These
bookstore solution providers handle customer service and online ordering
and delivery - both physical and via online modalities - of course
materials to online students. Other institutions have their own
sophisticated bookstore services and do not rely on an outside provider
for such services.
How
a school provides online technical support is another important element
that you should consider. A school’s technical support services become
particularly important during the beginning phases of when you actually
start and begin learning how online education really works.
Specifically, it is important that a school provides live technical
support at all hours of the evening, when most students are accessing
their online courses and working on assignments.
Things inevitably go wrong when working with a variety of web-based
software. You may not have your software configured properly. Your
username and password logon might not work, or you may have trouble
posting to a discussion forum. These are only a small sampling of some
of the technical problems you may encounter. When disaster strikes,
you’ll want to immediately talk with an expert who can rectify your
problem, especially because you are time-crunched enough as it is and
can’t afford to fall behind.
That’s why some schools provide 24/7 technical support services to their
online students, often through a third-party provider. One such provider
is a company called Embanet out of Toronto, Canada, which provides
round-the-clock technical support and help desk services for the
University of Texas System TeleCampus students and a number of other
providers of online MBA programs. The UT TeleCampus is a good example of
an institution that has all its bases covered in the area of technical
support.
In
addition to providing 24/7 support, the UT TeleCampus has a thorough
technical support website that covers everything online students need to
know about running the right software, maintaining their Internet
connections, and generally moving smoothly through their online courses
at all times.
In
addition to utilizing the services of their academic advisors, students
at many schools can take advantage of additional services of an academic
nature, such as special online writing courses that are separate from
the program curriculum, various mentoring and tutoring services, and
information literacy tutoring services that may be provided by the
campus library.
The
University of Phoenix, for example, has a Center for Writing Excellence
resource for all its online students that includes an automated and
proprietary “WritePoint” paper review service that provides feedback on
grammar and formatting, completed in minutes, on
the papers that students upload to the service.
At
Capella University, students can take advantage of a professional
coaching service to get advice related to applying what they have
learned in their courses to their current job responsibilities
(described in greater detail in Chapter Ten).
The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) has a live “Chat
with a Librarian” service available to students on a 24-hour basis. The
UMUC library also provides a full slate of online interactive tutorials
for its online students on such subjects as how to use the web for
research; how to cite sources in research papers; and how to search for
company, financial, and industry information in its library databases.
Career services is one area of online MBA programs where students
generally lose out. Most traditional on-campus MBA programs have a very
full slate of employer recruitment and career-advancement services that
physically put their students in front of the businesses that may be
seeking to employ them, and vice versa. For example, at the University
of Buffalo (UB), which has a highly ranked traditional MBA program,
students can take advantage of a number of creative career services
offered by the UB School of Management’s Career Resource Center. Most of
these services require a face-to-face meeting, such as on-campus
recruiting events where employers contact the Career Resource Center and
schedule a campus visit to interview and recruit candidates for
employment at a later date.
UB
also hosts employer information sessions where employers visit the UB
campus and provide valuable information about their prospective
permanent and summer positions. Such information sessions are a great
way for students to meet and network with professionals from a variety
of companies.
As
an online student, you will not be able to take advantage of
opportunities such as those provided by UB’s Career Resource Center,
unless, of course, you can travel to the face-to-face recruitment events
when they occur. All is not lost, however. Some online programs have
very sophisticated career-development services that are provided to
students who can’t come to campus.
Capella University, a virtual university without a campus, has an online
Career Center that is part of its Advising and Academic Support
division. In addition to providing a full array of job-search and
career-advancement information services through the Career Center’s
website, there’s an “Ask a Career Counselor” e-mail service. Through
this service, online students can e-mail career counselors assigned to
the School of Business their questions regarding resumes, cover letters,
marketing an online degree, salary negotiation, and career-advancement
strategies. Capella promises to respond to any career-related questions
within four business days.
Finally, many of the career services offered both online and on-campus
are not that vital of a concern to the majority of online MBA students,
who are typically mid-career professional already fully employed. If you
are a student who is seeking that first substantial job in the world of
business management after you earn your MBA, however, you’ll want to ask
the schools you are investigating to determine what kind of career
services they provide.
Chapter Eighteen covers the MBA job marketplace, including advice about
how to handle possible negative perceptions about online learning that
you may encounter with prospective employers.
Chapter Eighteen also has some great information about strategies
you can take for finding career advancement online.
Alumni services is another area where online students typically do not
participate nearly as much as on-campus students, but this does not mean
that you cannot become an active alumni. Many online programs are
encouraging their students to take a more active role in alumni
organizations and are updating their websites to better promote the many
services and business networking benefits provided by such organizations
to both online and on-campus students.
“I
am still involved with the alumni group, which welcomed me with open
arms even before I graduated,” said Regis University online MBA graduate
Katherine Porter. “Based on my experience, students would find it easy
to use all the services Regis offers. You never feel like you’re an
outsider, or in some other category just because you’re part of Regis’s
online programs.”
Again, just like in business, every institution should have some
value-added goods and services that make it stand out among its
competitors. In other words, what parts, or sum of all parts, give added
worth to a program beyond the fundamentals? In that spirit, here are
three broad questions you might explore as you continue your search for
the online MBA program that is right for you:
1.
Does the institution have a good track record for graduating successful
business professionals?
2.
Does the school’s student support system seem packaged and presented in
a way that makes it easy for you to find information and easily access
and take advantage of all the student services the school provides?
3.
What kind of tangible results related to career advancement and overall
practical business acumen and skills will you derive from earning an MBA
from this particular institution?
“Students should ask themselves if the degree from that school is
going to have value, and to some extent that is difficult to determine,
even once you have done all the research,” said Rick Niswander, dean of
graduate business programs, East Carolina University. “If I am going to
work in South Carolina, employers are going to understand the value of
an MBA degree from East Carolina University more than they are going to
understand one from Idaho State.”
The following chapters examine more ways you can fine-tune your decision-making process. They also discuss in greater detail the inner workings of online learning and teaching and how it is a viable way to get your MBA. As you can already tell, there is indeed a lot to consider. Don’t let that discourage you, though. After all, this is a decision that will affect the rest of your life, not to mention cost you a great deal of money and time in the relative short term.
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