The Flex Fully Employed MBA program’s benefits outweigh costs

New media has been presented as a tool to enhance classroom settings and revolutionize the accessibility of education. Its mission has changed, however, and now tends to focus primarily on resources to assist learning rather than to make it more accessible.

The potential for new media tools such as video podcasts and interactive online work to attract a broader range of students is high, but these tools are rarely developed enough to stand equivalent to traditional learning environments.

For students seeking graduate degrees, scheduling classes with a job on the side can make obtaining a graduate degree an unnecessary hassle “”mdash; enter new media.

Next fall, the UCLA Anderson School of Management is unveiling a new hybrid scheduling option, Flex, for its Fully Employed MBA Program. It combines video lectures with online environment tools that can replace half of the core coursework and traditional education to make class schedules adaptable to the needs of employed students.

Flex is a scheduling option that combines online instruction with face-to-face interaction at UCLA, while requiring four weekend campus visits, according to a statement by the Anderson School.

The Flex option allows students the opportunity to attend regularly scheduled classes or do equivalent work online for half of the course content, said Anderson Director of Hybrid Learning Initiatives George Ingersoll.

This is an approach other UCLA graduate programs should consider in order to become more accessible and to broaden their base of prospective students.

UCLA graduate programs should use new media to allow flexibility in the way graduate students enroll in classes and participate in education.

Schedules could be developed that place some of the course content online while keeping the important content and examinations in lectures.

By doing this, learning can occur at a time that is more adaptable to students’ other work concerns while maintaining important in-class lessons as well.

Establishing similar resources to make accessibility greater for other UCLA graduate programs would attract a larger pool of applicants who are encouraged by more flexible scheduling and would allow the schools a larger group of candidates to choose from.

Ultimately, it is up to the individual graduate programs to develop the resources for making accessibility easier for graduate students at additional cost, the results are beneficial to both the graduate programs and the students.

Anderson Director of Admissions Dylan Stafford said that the Flex option allows the Anderson to select students from a bigger pool that is not limited by distance from the school.

Stafford added that the Flex option will make the MBA program more accessible to the 10 percent of students enrolled in the Fully Employed MBA Program that fly to UCLA every weekend to attend class.

There will always be a debate surrounding the quality of education provided for students who learn through new media versus that of the traditional classroom environment. This debate has already been addressed in some schools at UCLA.

The School of Theater, Film and Television, for example, has incorporated technology-driven learning with success through supplementary online tools and the Master of Science in Engineering Online Program in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science is available in a fully online format.

But, will going online preserve the quality of an education taught in traditional classroom?

The major trade-off of new media, the limited social interactions between students and professors, is a serious factor to consider.

For graduate programs that are heavily focused on seminars such as those of the humanities, a significant replacement of personal interactions with isolated online work may slow down learning.

Furthermore, it would not be a good idea to have a significant amount of coursework for a highly hands-on graduate program like medicine online.

However, UCLA graduate programs uninterested in making technology part of their core curriculum should at the very least consider making the smaller aspects such as lectures and seminars available through video and audio podcasts.

Creating resources in the model of Flex that can replace content for students who cannot attend lecture could be practical for nearly all graduate programs.

The benefits of becoming accessible, in the long run, outweigh the costs to UCLA graduate programs.

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