Online offerings disrupt business schools and cause MBA “unbundling”
In a meeting held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, education officials came to a consensus that as the growth of purely online programmes has declined, a hybrid of online learning resources and class-based lessons are “the future”. This has caused a number of US universities to “unbundle” MBA courses particularly, with elite institutions such as Harvard partnering with public institutions to expand credential options outside of traditional structure. The associate dean of executive education at the Kellogg School of Management stated: “We have to keep pushing ourselves to advance the efficacy and better understand where online adds to the effectiveness of a class”.

Online Learning

Disrupting Business Education

As online offerings threaten to "unbundle" the MBA into individual certificate pieces, business schools must innovate and collaborate to survive.

As Harvard Business School's HBX and Boise State University work together to bring HBX's online business fundamentals program to Idaho students, their collaboration epitomizes some of the issues universities are working through in online business education.

HBX is still experimenting with offerings and markets, according to Patrick Mullane, executive director of HBX. He said that when HBX was launched, it was not initially envisioned that state institutions would be partners — but given HBX's mission of expanding access to Harvard's offerings, the Boise State partnership makes perfect sense. "We think it is a great model, but Boise State has a business faculty of its own, so one question was how you make a sale to them of inserting this HBX offering."

Gordon Jones, dean of the new College of Innovation and Design at Boise State, saidhe believes the future will involve integrating online offerings from world-class institutions with best-of-breed local partners. "I think public universities that aren't Top 100 ought to look hard at these kinds of collaborations. When I first discussed this with people in the business school, the typical response was 'we have people who teach accounting.' But the curriculum got glowing reviews from faculty and deans," he said. "I told them in three years I will hand it over to them, and they can make a thumbs-up or -down call."

Unbundling the MBA

Mullane and Jones spoke at the inaugural Business Education Online Learning Summit at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business on Sept. 20, where executives discussed how relationships are shifting between employers, business schools and educational technology vendors — and whether newcomers such as McKinsey Academy pose a significant threat. Several panels discussed how online offerings are disrupting business schools from within and without, including "unbundling" the MBA into smaller certificate pieces.

Daniel Pianko, founding managing director of University Ventures, a firm that invests in education-sector companies such as coding academies, said there is a middle ground between those who believe the university is going to be disrupted into extinction and those faculty members who plan to lecture as the sage on the stage until they retire. "The growth in purely online programs has basically stopped. We do not believe purely online is the wave of the future," he said. "Hybrid is the future."

One key issue: the perceived value of credentials and "micro-credentials" vs. two-year MBA degrees. Jonathan Finklestein is founder and CEO of Credly, a company that allows students to acquire share, and use credentials. He called credentials the currency of the labor market and said that the MBA is like giving students a $10,000 bill but no other denominations."It is a blunt instrument, and difficult to make change for," he said. "We see skills that offer a premium in the workplace, and are looking for ways to verify those in bundles or individually, then creating something portable, so that employers can trust that record has value. Students could then provide evidence that goes beyond the brand of the institution whose watermark is on the credential."