Big famous universities are still the strongest in MBAs.

Barney Thompson

Global. Weekend. Distance. Blended. The wide variety of terms now used to describe online MBAs illustrates how the digital provision of such courses has proliferated over the past few years. And this in turn points to a shift in attitudes towards online learning.
For some, online learning has brought only benefits: more choice of courses, more flexibility in how you learn, and a welcome disruption of the traditional MBA market.
In addition to business schools offering their own online courses, providers of massive open online courses — or Moocs — offer full MBAs, introductory business courses and elements of complete courses, enabling professionals to top up their knowledge and skills.
As part of this movement, Harvard Business School, for example, is now opening its online programme in business basics to students worldwide.
So far, so ordinary: the internet has done exactly the same thing to almost every field of human endeavour.
The big question for business schools is whether the rush to provide all these courses will devalue the concept of online MBAs to the point where only a few of the very best are considered to be worth anything, that is, to the stage where the top brands dominate the sector.
One way in which less prestigious schools could adapt would be to buy ready-made content from those higher up the rankings — in effect having elite schools franchise their courses to allow others to piggyback their brand.
The advantage would be potential savings in the time and expense required for schools to set up their own courses, while luring in students who would reject a less prestigious offering.
“Brand is important, but it is based on many things,” says Nigel Pye, assistant dean of the UK’s Warwick Business School’s executive and distance MBA programmes. “It is all very well having the brand, but part of it is the student experience, which is one of the things measured in the various rankings. “So it’s not just about delivery of materials. People might as well just buy a book with a DVD in the back if it was.”
It is the “whole experience” that sells the distance-learning MBA, he adds, “the way you manage students, how you respond to their queries and add relevance to the online materials. And you’ve got to have people who understand that material providing the response.”
If content becomes commoditised, says Prof Simon Evenett, academic director of the MBA programme at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, then smart MBA students will move to schools that add value in other areas.
“When it comes to coaching MBAs, 95 per cent of the battle is getting people over the difficulties they have with learning [the material],” Prof Evenett says. “That side of the businesses, which is often quite labour-intensive, is not something everyone can do.”
Some see some potential for generic materials being shared among courses in the same way that universities share textbooks. For instance, Imperial College Global MBA students can take a course in quantitative skills that was produced by Harvard Business Publishing. But the UK-based school stresses that this is only a “support course” and that the link with Imperial’s research reputation and academics is central to attracting students.
Indeed, while it is easy to see why a relatively unknown school might want to buy a top school’s course, it is harder to see the benefit for the elite brands.
“If I sold the Warwick MBA content, then presumably other schools are going to deliver it cheaper than me,” says Mr Pye. “So, I’d be diluting my market, and if you start doing that you could undermine your own brand.”
In any case, the sheer diversity of online courses — and the competition this engenders — can only have a positive effect, according to Prof Doug Shackelford, dean of the Kenan-Flagler business school at the University of North Carolina.
“I wasn’t around when the printing press came into play, but I can speculate people began to figure out that instead of having to go to university in Oxford or Paris, now there would be this instructor to write down his thoughts and put them in book, and we could stay at home and read,” says Prof Shackelford.
He adds: “Obviously, that’s not what happened. There is only a certain number of accountancy text books in the world, but every instructor has a very different take on how it should be taught.
“No one picks one up and says: ‘Let’s bow to that; it says it all’. I don’t see a point coming where you or I, revered as the expert, will have the final word.”