Mark Kobayashi-Hillary

I have been through the entire Liverpool University MBA programme, from 2001 to 2003, and I submitted my dissertation a year later. I have a background in IT management but I have changed career because of the MBA.

Certainly e-learning can provide a very flexible environment. When you have a virtual classroom, where your contributions don’t disappear, you can go back to the discussions time and time again. It’s also asynchronous, so you can take part during the daytime, during the evening after work, and during the weekend. When travelling for work, as long as I could get an internet connection, I could still contribute.

Surprisingly, group projects worked very well in the online environment. When you have the same deadlines, the same objectives, and are working on the same project, you do actually join together very well online.

Networking was particularly interesting. When there was a story in the news about a business in China, say, there would be people in my class working in China, contributing directly to the debate.

I found the online experience was preferable to a physical classroom. I already used SMS and instant messaging to keep in touch with people, so the virtual classroom felt very natural.

As well as the classroom, there was also a good web site where you could look up past grades, past essays, and forthcoming courses.

There were practical things that didn’t work so well. Sometimes, because the lectures were not interactive, there was a time-lag of a couple of days between a lecture and the start of the discussion. The use of live presentations such as web seminars, and the increasing prevalence of broadband, might improve matters.

Also, if the lecturer is not very experienced within the virtual environment, they may not feel particularly comfortable driving a written, online discussion. Some lecturers completely buy into the model and know exactly how to drive a text discussion, but others aren’t so comfortable.

Because it’s a written discussion, you do need to be confident about your use of written English. And some people who are not so used to writing in an argumentative style may struggle to get their points across.

What was interesting was the chance to apply ideas taken from the online classroom immediately.

Most of the people who study online are still working, so there’s a very fast feedback loop. You could take academic concepts from the classroom and try them out in your job, and report back. That’s really a huge benefit. Sometimes people would even drop real business problems into the classroom, and they’d have 20 other MBA students helping them out.

In my opinion, this really is the future.