Operation

As a blogger, I have been a failure in the last six months. I barely have enough time to tweet, let alone sit down for these extensively researched, tightly edited, and deeply insightful missives that characterize my blog. I tell you, 1005 words on finding love through optimization doesn’t just happen!

I have my excuses, of course. As the fabulous PHD Comics points out, most of us academics seem somewhat overbooked, despite the freedom to set much of our schedule. I am not alone in being congenitally unable to turn down “opportunities” when they come by. “Help hire a Norwegian professor?” Sounds fun! “Be the external examiner for a French habilitation degree?” I am sure I’ll learn a lot! “Referee another paper?” How long can that take? “Fly to Australia for a few days to do a research center review?” Count me in! And that was just four weeks in February.

All this is in addition to my day job that includes a more-than-healthy dose of academic administration. Between doing my part to run a top business school and to move along in research, not to mention family time, including picking up the leavings of a hundred pound Bernese Mountain Dog (the “Mountain” in the name comes from said leavings) and entertaining a truly remarkable nine-year-old son, my time is pretty well booked up.

And then something new comes along. For me, this newness is something I had a hand in putting together: the Tepper School’s new FlexMBA program. This program offers our flagship MBA program in a hybrid online/onsite structure. Every seven weeks or so, students in the program gather at one of CMU’s campuses (we have them in Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley, and New York, we have not yet used our Qatar campus) and spend a couple days intensively starting their new courses. This is followed by six weeks of mixed synchronous and asynchronous course material. Asynchronous material is stuff the students can do in their own time: videos, readings, assignments, and so on. The synchronous lesson is a bit more than an hour in a group, meeting via a group video conference, going over any issues in the material and working on case studies, sample problems, and so on. The course ends with exams or other evaluations back on campus before starting the next courses.

Our commitment is to offer the same program as our full-time residential MBA and our part-time in-Pittsburgh MBA. So this means, the same courses, faculty, learning objectives, and evaluations that our local students take.

We started this program last September with 29 students, and so far it has gone great. The students are highly motivated, smart, hard-working, and engaged. And the faculty have been amazing: they have put in tons of work to adapt their courses to this new structure. Fortunately, we have some top-notch staff to keep things working. Unlike some other MBA programs, we have not partnered with any outside firm on this. If we are going to offer our degree, we want it to be our degree.