Dr. Neil Hair

I have great pleasure in blogging details of a number of seriously impressive innovations in the area of teaching for our MBA program at RIT. I am of course referring to a decision to develop core MBA courses offered online to our adoring public; traditional distance learning students, overseas students, current students who want to develop virtual management skills and quite possibly alums who want refresher courses that are bleeding edge. I am developing the MBA core Marketing Concepts class and this will be offered for the first time next quarter in the spring and again in the summer. As with all things spring cleaned a number of innovations can be reported since I last taught an online course. These include the use of streaming media lectures that are (of course) captioned and offered in a number of portable media formats including MP4 (podcasts and ipod video). The idea is to offer you access to your learning materials in the formats that are most accessible to you. So if youre on a train, plane or riding responsibly in a car with hands free support you can hear musings from your team of instructors. It goes much further than that however, recognizing the importance of managing in the unrestricted time zone space we are also training and expecting students to perform management functions in the same environment. That means being able to deliver the same materials, presenting streaming presentations, managing truly global teams across different time zones and pursuing class as you would in a traditional setting but with many more tangible outputs to sell yourself with. Sounds outlandish doesnt it? Well consider this, more and more international consultancies use experts across the globe coming together to work on collaborative projects and working in asynchronous & synchronous time. Kodak do it. Xerox do it. GM. Toyota. B&L.. the list goes on – they're even doing these things in Second Life. Shhhh…. watch this space… so are we.

Are you?