($) Ahead of the curve: What might set specific business schools apart as near-term leaders in delivering the online learning experience?

(Dang we coulda sworn this post went up before. But ‘pparently not. Lots of ideas here! Grab your favorite beverage and settle in, BSer, this is a long one.)

As a followup to our post on Monday about what your experience might be like as a student in the coronavirus era of online classes, let’s talk about the schools. This question is relevant even without coronavirus, because coronavirus is changing society. Even if all major U.S. universities go back to in-person teaching in the Fall (highly unlikely but who knows), there will still be reasons for many schools to embrace online education way more than they ever did before.

So which schools will succeed with that?

Which ones might be able to deliver a better experience to you, a future MBA student, than others?

It comes down to many issues, and the experience itself will TOTALLY depend on the actual professor who is conducting the online class. However, here are some broad-strokes guidelines to consider and ideas to ponder, in case you’re either a) worried about what it might be like to go for an MBA if it’s going to be fully online, and/or b) looking to take advantage of the online opportunity, since hey, it’s likely way way cheaper and easier for you to not uproot yourself and move across country to campus in another city entirely and you’d rather just go to school from home where you live now.

Note that we’re not doing a survey of all top universities nor the individual bschools at each; this is a random collection of observations we’ve gathered, both about higher ed as a whole and how professors generally are adapting, and also specific insights we know to be true of specific MBA programs based on the work we’ve done in this field since (eek this has been a long time now) before online education was ever a “thing” (EssaySnark has been operating in this space and participating in the tech changes since ugh forever). In other words: We won’t be telling you explicitly that School X or School Y has got there game on and can surely deliver a top-notch MBA experience online, and School A or School B will not. Instead, it’s a collection of things for you to consider if you’re thinking of which of your accepted schools to attend, and you want to maximize the experience of online.

Also note: This is now a fast-changing sector, one of the fastest on the planet, outside the viral research labs that are furiously working everywhere to solve the actual coronavirus problem we’re living with. Higher ed has been placed under tremendous stress and they are trying to fix this with ways to keep students enrolled and attending. There will be some smaller institutions that go belly-up as a result of coronavirus. This post is not about them; it’s about the deep-pockets well-endowed universities that are bedrocks of American society. Like the ones you want to attend for your MBA.

OK, enough intro. Here’s the actual content that you come looking for from the ‘Snark.

Premium content starts here…
———–
 
Wanna read more? We appreciate our paying blahg members so much and would be ever so grateful if you’d subscribe!!
 
 

 
Premium content ends. If you want to get the whole thing, buy access to all the snark here!

 

You may not want to be doing an online education, but if you’re forced to, or if you have the option between online and in-person and you choose to do online, then there are many factors that will affect your experience. Most will be fully out of your control — and we don’t expect you to be choosing one school over another based on these components. But they’re helpful to consider, because not all MBAs are created equal, and not all online MBAs will be equal, either. That you can count on.

Have questions we can address about any of this? We’re here as always, along for the ride! Let’s see what tomorrow holds. Things are moving so fast these days.