It is this extra cost of faculty time and coordination, across a full set of classes and growing number of electives, that pushes the tuition up to a level similar to the regular MBA, says Bursch. Kenan-Flagler has had to get good at a coordinated team-teaching model. And is also creates a quality management challenge, requiring a coordinating professor to ensure consistency across delivery iterations. This means nine times the amount of professor time. The 15-person cap meant setting up nine different sections (each meeting at different times so students can choose which best suits them) says Bursch. In January this year 112 new students all needed to go through Analytical Tools. The proof is in the student-subscription pudding: in 2011 student enrollment stood at 19 now it is 729.Įxponential enrollment is a particular operational headache for because, to hit its quality metric, it has to provide for these students via classes strictly capped at 15. The online ranks in top 3 among online competitors, and is currently 1 in the Forbes list. The Kenan-Flagler MBA is ranked in the top-20 in the U.S. Kenan-Flagler and 2U have collated data to show student graduation rates and job-placement rates are at comparable levels to the real-world program.
There is no back seat, nowhere to hide in a class of 15,” he says.īut there is benefit accordingly. Paucek, CEO-turned-student, is quick to point out the pain factor of small classes: "You have to come prepared! It’s plain if you’re absent, plain if you haven't done the reading or watched the lecture, and plain if you don’t participate.
The distinction comes in the interactive event, where learners in small virtual groups get the attention and input time that online options don’t usually provide. These online lectures are much as one might experience on Coursera, or Harvard's HBX, or similar. UNC faculty create the content, and lectures are recorded directly for camera (not recording a live class) and edited by the 2U production team. This is the so-called “flipped classroom”-the lecture is experienced solo and in-class time with the professor is spent interactively. Like all students, the classes he takes are of two types: asynchronous pre-recorded lectures to watch in your own time, and synchronous real-time class meetings. “Eating your own dog food” is indeed persuasive. As a CEO of a listed company, Paucek had many top-tier options in the MBA admissions world-but chose his own product. He is himself a currently a student there.
To the success of overturning these preconceptions, at least at UNC, Paucek claims the students reliably refer to themselves as “ Tar Heels.” The path Kenan-Flagler took in 2010 towards achieving this was to outsource all non-academic functions to a Maryland-based Nasdaq-listed firm, 2U (TWOU).ĢU built the Learning Management System–the course portal–and runs the Adobe (ADBE) Connect classroom as part of its turn-key solution that includes marketing, student placements, faculty development, and administrative services.ĭescribing the relationship between UNC and 2U, Bursch says, “We are the Cadillac they are the Michelin tires we run on.”ĢU CEO Chip Paucek describes his company mission as “redeeming the lack of equality to the campus” that online students have always felt, and making the online student a full member of the university community.Īs the 2U site says, the prospective online student may think: “I’ll be on my own, I won’t get to know or bond with my classmates, my degree won’t be legitimate, the professors are not the core faculty, the instructors don’t care, there’s no one there to help me…” “We’re trying to build a full set of courses and electives, as a normal MBA would have,” says Bursch. The aim is everything in the residential program is reproduced in the online offering, particularly building out the elective portfolio at the rate of four to six new courses a year so that online students are similarly served in terms of choice of concentration. He is also not cherry-picking for online scale.