OR/MS Today - October 2000 - Issues in Education

October 2000

Issues in Education

Changes in Technology,
Changes in Education

By Erik Gordon

Technological advances historically have benefited education. Advances in printing technology lowered the cost of books and made them widely available. In the 1950s, movie projectors and the ubiquitous film strip machines brought students sights they otherwise would never have seen.

In the 1970s, The University of Florida's Warrington College of Business Administration started televising introductory courses. This produced classes superior to the traditional large-section courses taught by ever-changing armies of graduate students. A real faculty member taught each of the new television classes. All students received the same lectures, and this produced uniform results rather than the haphazard results that depended on the luck of the graduate student draw.

In 1999, the College launched its first MBA program conducted almost entirely via the Internet. Students visit the physical premises of the university once each term to meet professors and fellow students in person, to take exams, and to start their new round of courses.

The Internet MBA program follows the same curriculum as the College's other MBA programs. It uses the same faculty and relies on group work in the same manner as the traditional programs. Study groups meet for face-to-face discussion during on-campus visits and are in regular contact the rest of the time, no matter where they may live or where their careers send them.

The Internet MBA students use a variety of technologies and software applications, many of which were custom developed at the College, for the program. A Lotus Domino-based back-end supports not just discussion threads and course information sites, but also timed assignments, automatically and instantly-graded quizzes and assignments, and blind answer/blind critique exercises. In the latter, after students post their answers to an exercise, they can see answers posted by other students (without being able to identify who posted them). They also can see critiques and comments on their work and can post critiques and comments on other students' work, all anonymously. Lotus Notes is used for group work areas, bulletin boards, meeting rooms, and document storage and retrieval.

Microsoft's IIS and Active Service Pages, along with Java Script, power grade look-ups and many of the navigation links between sites and servers. Digital video camera output encoded into Real Media (and using Standard Multimedia Internet Language "SMIL") coordinate the delivery and navigation of videos, visual elements and lecture outlines. Lotus Screen Cam is used to record screen shot videos with voice over instruction. Team presentations are produced by students in PowerPoint, with added audio, and converted to Real or ASF onto a Real Server for streaming video.

The College's in-house IT group custom-assembled the technologies for two reasons. First, they could not find exactly what they wanted in off-the-shelf packages. Second, they knew that as the program evolved they would want to make changes without waiting for an outside developer to get around to "a new release."

A recent survey by the College of its Internet MBA students revealed not only that the students perceive their experience as being of the same quality as a face-to-face experience, they believe that they interact as much or more than face-to-face program students, and they feel very close to their classmates.

Flexibility is a hallmark of the Internet program (which originally was called "the Flex MBA"). A student who misses even one weekend in the executive program risks falling irretrievably behind. In the Internet program, a student can be on the road and still view and re-view lectures at his or her convenience. An Internet student can participate in synchronous discussions when that is convenient or can participate asynchronously. Students participate when they are at their best so the quality of their participation and learning is higher than it is when a student is exhausted or distracted the weekend the class meets.

On the other hand, the Internet program puts more responsibility on the student to stay current and to participate in the learning process. It is a program for more mature, more disciplined students.

The first professor to develop an Internet MBA course in the Florida program, Dr. Sandy Berg, says the threaded discussions and online exercises provide incredible opportunities for interaction and immediate feedback. In a traditional executive program, if a student has an idea, he or she must wait until the next class or study group meeting to test it. In the Internet MBA program, the student posts the idea and generally receives immediate feedback from several class members. The students question, refine, or discard the idea in an interactive process that allows the professor to participate.

The Internet MBA has opened opportunities to reach high-quality students who otherwise could not pursue an MBA and to deliver an MBA that is in some ways superior to traditional executive or in-residence programs. Students come from a wide variety of career and undergraduate programs, and from as far away as the Netherlands.

What will the future bring to education? Virtual reality discussions and field trips? Hologram-based meetings and site visits? It's never easy to predict the course of technology, but it is easy to predict that technology will continue to change how we deliver education.

R. M. Erik Gordon is the director of the MBA program and a professor of marketing at the University of Florida. He can be reached by e-mail: gordonrm@dale.cba.ufl.edu.

This is a regular column sponsored by INFORMED, the INFORMS Forum on Education. Contact Salwa Ammar at ammars@palm.lemoyne.edu

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