Georgia Web MBA
We can say that we offer a truly international MBA programme. education. They had the foresight to predict that education was going to expand beyond the faceto-face and that we needed to be a player in the movement to online education. And so, the programme they devised has provided an excellent framework for today’s offerings. We are very pleased to state that our online programme has achieved a graduation rate of 86%. We are very proud of this. Our programme is a cohort model, and the involvement of the students through team based learning has been a resounding success. All in all we see a very bright future ahead of us in delivering education online.
Q
Some would propose that the accepted wisdom is that campus based learning provides a more focussed environment for the facilitation of university education. For executive education in the early 21st century where business requires strategic flexibility and innovation, is this a fit perspective?
I do think it’s important to recognise what your customers are seeking. While we may differ on whether face-to-face or online is the preferred method of delivery, the simple truth is that online satisfies a demand segment that might not otherwise have been served. Traditional face-to-face programmes are those in which classes meet on a regular basis perhaps once a week, sometimes
more often than that. By contrast, prospective online students are living very complex lives. The working professional to whom we are pitching our programme is travelling. They have families, they are going to soccer matches, they are worried about the spouse’s job and the demands on their time, so although the old style of coming to class once a week is still around for many, our target audience finds this to be an inflexible format. We do believe that our online programme offers the quality you would find in a face-to-face programme and we are doing it at a very affordable price. Probably five or six years ago we had more difficulty attracting students because the technology was not yet truly a part of the corporate psyche. We believe that it is now.
Q
The Georgia WebMBA is accredited by the AACSB and SACS. How important is accreditation to the component colleges and their web based offerings at the state, national, and international levels?
A plethora of enquiries from students all over the world have been based on the advice and recommendations of former students.
As mentioned earlier, we regard accreditation as one of the vital pillars of our value proposition. Companies are becoming wiser with regard to the quality of MBAs and web MBAs. In more cases than not, accreditation becomes the benchmark that governs whether an employer will sponsor a student.
CEO
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