Kimberly D. Elsbach, associate dean and professor of management at UC-Davis Graduate School of Management, in a Hollywood studio filming her forthcoming online course
Kimberly Elsbach has taught the core course in organizational behavior to MBA students for 15 years. But getting all the material and exercises into an online format proved far more time consuming than she ever could have imagined.
Elsbach, associate dean and professor of management at UC-Davis’ Graduate School of Management, figures she spent roughly three months planning every minute of what will be ultimately be a 2,000-minute class, half of it asychronous and half synchronous, before she even walked into a Hollywood studio in early March.
“It was a huge amount of work,” she says. “In some ways it is work I should have done before because it has made me rethink a lot of the things I do in my live class. You have to organize your teaching in a way that makes you think about how to get this material across and how students will grasp and learn it.”
THE FIRST ONLINE MBA PROGRAM ON THE 10-CAMPUS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SYSTEM
Among the faculty at UC-Davis’ Graduate School of Management, Elsbach is something of a guinea pig, the first professor to convert one of her classes into an online format for an online MBA that is expected to accept its first class sometime next year. Within two years of launch, Dean Rao Unnava expects it to be the school’s largest MBA program, eclipsing its full-time offering at UC-Davis and two part-time programs in Sacramento and San Ramon.
Though there has been an explosion of online MBA programs in recent years, with U.S. News ranking 267 different options at U.S. business schools this year, this will be the first online MBA program offered on the 10-campus University of California system and the first in Northern California.
For Dean Unnava, who assumed his job in June of 2016 from Ohio State University where he had spent 32 years, the decision was a no-brainer. “You can reach a broader range of students,” he says. “You can increase the diversity of the pool of students. You can reach non-tradiitonal students and those who don’t have access to what we now offer and can’t drive. California is a big state. Now they can come for this degree virtually. Our mission is education and an online degree helps us achieve that mission. That is the bottom line.”
PICKING A CHAMPION IN A ‘DAMN-THE-TORPEDOES, FULL-SPEED-AHEAD’ EX-U.S. ARMY SERGEANT
Getting a top-notch online MBA off the ground, however, is no small undertaking. Every school opting to offer an online version of its MBA program must jump over a large number of hurdles, from gaining faculty support and cooperation to university approval. Along the way, there are dozens of decisions, small and large, that can influence the quality and the success of a new program. This is the story of UC-Davis’ efforts to create a standout online offering.
Once Dean Unnava decided that it was something of a no-brainer, he had to convince the faculty to approve it. One step was to get on board an enthusiastic champion for the idea. Unnava tapped Robert Yetman, an accounting professor who has been teaching at the business school for more than a dozen years since 2003. Winner of a half dozen teaching awards, Yetman also had created the first master’s of accounting program in the UC system so he knew the nitty-gritty of gaining the necessary approvals for a new program.
Besides, years ago he served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army as an intelligence analyst and a Czech interpreter. “I have this damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead attitude,” laughs Yetman. He has another personality trait crucial for the task: He’s obsessed with detail. “I want to make sure the courses are prepared and they are prepared on time. I want to make sure the technology is used to its full extent. I don’t sleep well. Everything, if it goes wrong, is my fault.”
Dean H. Rao Unnava of UC-Davis’ Graduate School of Management thought it was a no-brainer to do an online MBA
‘THE FACULTY HERE ARE CAUTIOUS, VERY CAUTIOUS’
The dean didn’t have to convince him to take the job. “Good grief,” Yetman adds, “we are in Northern California and there really was no online MBA program in the cradle of technology. It seemed absurb. My point of view is what took us so long? We are sitting in the middle of one of the largest population bases in the country. We just want to be the best in our own backyard.”
The biggest initial hurdle? The school’s professors. “The faculty here are cautious, very cautious,” observes Yetman. “They are an amazing faculty who put quality first and foremost. But they had to believe that the courses are going to be as good or better or we won’t do it.”
There were obvious questions, too. “Some faculty said, ‘Why would we start an online MBA program at Davis? Why wouldn’t everyone just go to UNC or Indiana University? The evidence suggests contrary. Most online students, upwards of 70% or higher, come from a 300-mile radius. Why? Brands are local. If you are looking for a job in Walnut Creek, maybe there are some employers who want a top 20 MBA but most employers don’t. They just want it from a good school, and UC-Davis is known locally and it has local cache. You take someone from UNC and put them against someone from us in this area and it’s not necessarily clear they would go with the higher-ranked MBA. That is the biggest surprise and that is what allows you to start an online program and not worry about any other competitor.”
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Robert Yetman is heading the effort at UC-Davis to create an online MBA program
‘THE WAY STUDENTS LEARN HAS CHANGED’
Besides, for just about all the faculty, online teaching was something entirely new. “The problem is being willing to engage with new technologies and being comfortable doing so,” says Brad Barber, a finance professor who also serves as associate dean. Barber acknowledges that faculty are trained to be critical, to see the flaws in any argument. So it is inevitable that tough questions arise, even when there is general approval. “I am in my 50s and there has been enormous support for going in this direction. Yet you still see people saying it will cheapen the degree or change the student experience. It’s true it is changing the student experience but it will not be worse. It will be different.”
Victor Stango, who teaches finance and economics at Davis and serves as academic director of the school’s existing full-time and part-time MBA programs, echoes that feeling. “Two years ago, I was in the category of being vehemently opposed to online education, particularly for reactionary reasons,” concedes Stango. “But I’ve come around since then for two reasons. First, this won’t be completely online. It’s not a canned program that is pre-recorded. And second, the pedagogical tools have advanced so that I can do things I can’t do in a real classroom. It has the potential to be just as good and better in some ways. The other thing I’ve learned is that the way students learn has changed. I have gotten to the point where I am one of the old guys and we just need to recognize that the world has changed. The romantic notion of us scribbling away on a chaukboard may not be the best way to do it.”
His colleagues agree. “A lot has happened in the last ten years,” reasons Elsbach. “It used to be that online education was seen as a dumbed-down version. But now there are really high quality programs from top schools so the stigma associate with online programs has faded. And I don’t think it will cannibalize our regular programs because the students we’ll get can’t afford to take two years off of a job to go to a two-year program.so I think we will reach a new audience.”
THE SCHOOL INTERVIEWED FIVE PROVIDERS BEFORE PICKING 2U AS A PARTNER
After a series of meetings to educate the faculty on the benefits of an online option, the group took its first vote in June on whether to pursue the idea. Surprisingly, it was unanimous. For Yetman, the vote represented an early victory but far more hurdles remained. Among other things, there is also a campus approval required for the program as well as one for the courses. And there is an off-campus review by the UC system involving external views. All told, the approvals can take in excess of a year’s worth of time and effort.
“The UC system is a bureaucratic behemoth,” concedes Yetman. “They want to be sure they are getting the highest quality. But when the UC system finally blesses something, you can have confidence it is pretty good.”
One early decision was whether to develop the program in-house or to seek an outside partner. With limited internal resources, the school leaned toward having a partner who could bring the best technology to the game. Yetman interviewed five or six external players in the online space. “What you look for there is trust,” he explains. “If a company promises something, can you trust that they will deliver?”
‘WE DEVELOPED A TRUST WITH 2U RATHER QUICKLY’
2U Inc., he says, passed the trust test. The publicly-traded online higher education provider had already built an impressive portfolio of online MBAs with a range of business schools, including UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. But it can take 60% of all the revenue from an online MBA program.
“I felt we developed that trust with 2U rather quickly,” adds Yetman. “I feel they reciprocated in the trust they have with us. They are high class, top notch. They know what they are doing. They constantly challenged me with their expertise. They have hit every one of their marks and have kept every promise they made. The 2U platform is rich with vehicles that allow students to connect with each other. Students don’t have to be in the same place to talk to each other. They can be anywhere and that can create a cohort.”
2U, moreover, would not only help lead the faculty through the grueling paces of putting their courses online, it also had the studio to do production quality video. The firm would also aggressively market the program, recruiting most of the applicants, even booking hotels and arranging food for immersion sessions. There’s 24-7 tech support for faculty and students. “They even hire a makeup artist to make someone like me look better in front of a camera,” says Yetman. “Sure, they take a cut and it’s not trivial but if you saw from the inside the work they put into that, they deserve every penny of it. Many other schools told us that.”
REDESIGNING THE SCHOOL’S MBA CLASSES FOR AN ONLINE WORLD
After clearing the inevitable administrative hurdles, the biggest task ultimately comes down to planning out the curriculum and redesigning the school’s MBA courses for the online world. Half the program will be asychronous where students sit at their computers, watch videos, perform assignments and engage in discussions. All of those sessions are being prepared by UC-Davis faculty. The other half of the program is composed of synchronous content where students are in a virtual room, visible to each other on squares of a computer screen, with a faculty member conducting the live class.
“When they have a question,” explains Yetman, “a little box lights up. If I want to form four groups out of the 16 people in a class, I can do that and give them ten minutes to work on a project. I can watch them in a virtual room. Ten minutes later, each team can do a presentation, all online. This is pretty cool.” The synchronous sessions will not always have a current professor running them so Davis will have to expand its adjunct faculty to accommodate all of them.
The biggest difference is how the same material will be taught. “They have you script your class in chunks of time,” says Barber. “The way students can interact online is through video lectures, readings, quizzes, exercises and discussion boards. There is a whole menu of ways to engage online, and there is reserach on how you maintain people’s attention in an online environment. One of the misnomers is that you do not tape your 90-minute lecture and post it online. You need to chunk material with clear objectives in five-to-ten minute segments on the video side because attention is lost after that time.”
DON’T MISS: OUR NEW ONLINE MBA HUB FOR RANKINGS, PROGRAM PROFILES AND FEATURES
Kimberly Elsbach recorded her video for UC-Davis’ online MBA in Los Angeles
A DOZEN WEEKLY MEETINGS ONLINE WITH 2U STAFF BEFORE STEPPING INTO A STUDIO
The program also will feature immersions twice a year to allow students to show up in a single location with professors. Over the two-year program, each student will have to attend at least two of the immersion which will probably occur over a long weekend starting on Friday. “We are geographically blessed. One of the immersions will be in Davis, another can be in San Francisco, or Napa, or Silicon Valley.”
2U advised the school’s faculty that it should take between 150 hour and 200 hours to convert their classes into the chunks of learning for an online format—before ever entering a studio to do the filming. “I spent at least that much,” says Elsbach. “It took a good three months of work to get the course ready in course planner where it is planned down to the minute. I’ve taught this course for 15 years but had never gone through that process systematically.”
To redesign her course, she met every week online with 2U staffers for a dozen weeks through November, December and part of January, before flying to Los Angeles to record her video sessions in late February. Together, they went through every minute of teaching, outlining the course goals and to achieve those objectives online. In her ten-week course, Elsbach had to design 100 minutes of online work that students would do on their own to every 100 minutes of learning with her direct and live involvement. There was one rehearsal after another, leading to still more revisions. All group activities had to be put in the live class sessions she will hold once a week. That in itself was a big change because she would ordinarily go back and forth betwen lectures, discussions and activities in an on-campus class.
‘THE EXPERIENCE HAS MADE ME RETHINK A LOT OF THINGS I DO IN MY LIVE CLASS’
“It was a huge amount of work,” she says. “In some ways, it is work I should have done before. It has made me rethink a lot of things I do in my live class. It was work just thinking about how to get this material across and how students will grasp and learn it. You have to organize your teaching in a way that fulfils the goals of the course.”
Little is left to spontaneity. “You can have lectures with slides but they don’t want you to have more than ten minutes of lectures or slides in a shot. You have quizzes, videos, and you’ve got to organize the class so it is broken up so you don’t talk for a long time. It’s not something you can just slap together. In many ways, it is more work than putting together a live class because you have these time limits and you want to make it work for three to five years.”
Besides the mini-lectures, she also had to orchestrate videotaped roundtable discussions with two students, recruited from the University of Southern California. These segments simular an in-class, back-and-forth conversation. “You have an experience. You reflect on it by listening to the roundtable discussion. You are given some theoretical frameworks and then you test it in another experience.”
‘THEY HAD TO DO MAKEUP AND HAIR’
Elsbach had been on camera before, mainly for local TV news, so when she had to show up to record her sessions, she walked into the studio confident and without any jitters. “They had to do makeup and hair,” she laughs. “They do this slate between every take and sound checks. It’s more of a professional production than I had ever done before. Yet, they want you to do it in one take. If things go wrong, you can do a retake. But it is not like filming a movie where everything is perfect. The videotapes that come out of it are pretty true to what would happen in a real class. They are not absolutely perfect.”
During the first studio visit, Elsbach taped all of her lectures in an 11-hour day. The following day, she returned to the studio and spent the entir eday taping roundtables with student volunteers. 2U has been editing the tapes until she will have to run through a single class to make sure everything works smoothly. “It was actually fun and I was pleasantly surprised at how professional and organized the 2U people are. They really know what they are doing, and they know what will make the class engaging. It’s not going to be a dumbed down version of our MBA.”
As the first Davis prof to go through the process, Elsbach has put together a tip sheet for her colleagues. Her advice: It will take longer than you think to translate your in-person class to online. “But it is probably worth spending that time because you want the online class to be as good as your in-person class, but it is a completely different animal and you have to take the time to make it work.”
LIKELY PRICETAG FOR THE NEW ONLINE MBA: $120,960
Yetman says that when the MBA online program is launched sometime next year, it will be priced equal to the school’s part-time MBA program in San Ramon which carries a fairly hefty pricetag of $120,960. That would make the UC-Davis program one of the most expensive online MBA degrees in the world behind only Carnegie Mellon University’s $128,000 MBA program. It’s even more than UNC’s $114,048 online option or Syracuse University’s $84,186 online MBA, both 2U clients.
Admission standards, adds Yetman, will be in line with Davis’ part-time programs where the average GMAT score is 579 and students average nearly seven years of work experience. Students would be able to complete their MBA degree in as little as two years or as long as four to six years. By and large, the online version of the MBA will be the same as Davis’ campus version with the unit requirements, courses, and faculty—and roughly the same electives as well.
“The 2U model is to start small,” says Yetman. “We could have just 20 in the first cohort, but it will be a great opporunity to get it done right. It’s not about making money. It’s about offering a quality education that the faculty are happy to deliver and the students are happy to receive. Our hope is that the program gets much bigger, perhaps an intake of 50 to 80 students four times a year.”
‘THE TRULY SCARY PART FOR FACULTY? THE ONLINE MBA MAY BE THE BETTER VERSION’
Yetman has scheduled his class toward the end to allow his colleagues to go first. “My motto is you never ask someone to crawl through a hole unless you are prepared to go through one as well,” he says. “But now there’s genuine excitement n the part of the faculty who are lookng forward to creating these courses.”
The faculty, he says, has gotten over their initial concern that online education could never equal the quality of face-to-face classroom learning. “Several years ago, you may have gotten faculty who would say they are afraid that this could never be as good,” he says.
“But when you team up with a company like 2U and you see the full suite of technology available, you actually come away with the idea that this may be better than a professor with a piece of chalk in front of a blackboard. The truly scary part is, ‘Oh my gosh, this may be the better version.’ That is the real scary part.”
DON’T MISS: OUR NEW ONLINE MBA HUB FOR RANKINGS, PROGRAM PROFILES AND FEATURES
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