With growing digital classes, what is the future of traditional MBAs?

Abstract

Due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, institutes worldwide moved their classes to the online mode. While the administrators of the courses that required fieldwork or laboratory experience agreed on the adverse effects of continuing working online, the B-School fraternity’s views on online teaching has been largely divided. This divide in the opinions existed way before the pandemic, from the time when online MBAs were introduced. A fraction of people who feel that the online MBAs are able to do justice to the objectives of an MBA, are also the ones who claim that a shift to the online mode did not disrupt the learnings. The other faction, however, feels that an MBA involves something beyond online teaching which only a physical engagement can provide. To find out which line of thought holds more merits, the authors of this article tried to understand the issue from the MBA students’ perspectives. A three-month-long qualitative study was conducted at a B-school with a residential two-year programme. The students who were interviewed in-depth as part of the study had experienced both physical and virtual learning.