New technologies have altered everything in our lives, education included. Online courses from respected universities are becoming all the rage now, as everybody values their time too much to waste it on coming to class in person.
Still, there hasn’t been a lot of change in MBA programs until recently: to obtain a degree in business, in most cases you have to give up your job and immerse yourself into face-to-face studies.
Subtle Changes
Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that now aspiring MBAs might have another option: more and more higher education institutions are using qualifications earned online. The popularity of over-the-internet degrees is growing, and it is not likely to stop soon.
In 2016, five new schools were included into the online MBA ranking conducted by Financial Times.
To make these changes, many things had to happen – like emerging obstacles on the way to studying abroad (due to visa conditions becoming more severe), the desire of business schools to expand to foreign markets, innovations in online teaching methods and the growing respect for online degrees.
How This Happened
Throughout the world, the amount of online business courses has been growing, as well as the number of people ready to pay money for them. It has been happening everywhere, but the underlying reasons were quite different. For instance, Australia has had experience in online programs for a long while already, since many people there prefer studying online to going to a faraway place. Great Britain has used internet education to find more foreign students who couldn’t obtain a visa or didn’t have enough money to study in the UK itself.
Moreover, the demand for online degrees has been growing so drastically in recent years that it has far overreached the existing supply.
Technologies offer new and interesting ways of teaching online and making this kind of education more interactive and engaging. For instance, lectures in online courses are divided into several parts, so that students could ask questions while ‘sitting’ through it.
Top business schools have already realized that online education may be their next golden goose, like the UK Warwick Business School, which has far more online students than full-time ones. This university took the online courses challenge very seriously: they have two movie studios on campus to record lectures and other kinds of content as well as to stream it for students.
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