The experience is something most professionals and full-time MBA students will never appreciate. The friendships built through an intense environment will last forever, and have led to an invaluable network through the industry. With study tours, the Online MBA in IT course work turns the world into a global campus. Study tours are part of the curriculum and requirement for graduation. Students meet and learn from businessmen and women, government officials and politicians, and senior members of the corporate world. Courses such as cross cultural negotiations, critical operational analysis, global communications, corporate leadership, and business strategy are taught in the boardroom of Lufthansa Airlines in Germany, a GE power processing factory in Budapest, Hungary, or the halls of British Parliament. Classes begin on the chalkboard back home but absolutely finish on the shop floor next to a computer assembly line in Beijing, China. Intense class discussions combined with electronic case studies, case analysis, guests lecturing, and hand son consulting projects are often held on location in the territory under study.
Every semester, in addition to the traditional MBA students who had taken time off from their corporate life to enroll in the distance learning MBA program, I would find one or two students who were clearly "outliers" to these main corporate types-for example, a physician, an attorney, an executive director from a nonprofit organization, or a small business owner or entrepreneur. It did not take long to realize this trend was an Indicator of an under interest, and need, for these well-educated professional swell trained in the education of their profession-to learn about the business side of their professional lives.
Special to Duke was the global emphasis. International business practices are best absorbed in an international environment. The fact that the program facilitated the visitation of local or multinational companies, and sponsored speakers from local businesses or government officials, can not be replicated in a classroom in Durham, North Carolina. There is no traditional MBA program that can address practical business problems and then experience them in a local environment. Louis holds classes on campus at the modern five-story, 135,000-square-foot facility. The Center offers EMBA students elegant accommodations, dining, lounge, a fitness center, a pub, and a business center under one roof. Similarly, Ford ham University hosts classes in Manhattan at the Lincoln Center campus and three weekend residential at a beautiful conference center less than a half-hour? S drive from the city in Tarry town, When the reserve calls for being on the actual campus of the corporation, the classroom is held in the corporate boardroom and lodging at a contracted hotel nearby. When the corporate boardroom becomes the classroom students meet with senior officers from the host company, sometimes with the CEO or CFO, tour the facility, and lunch with employees. When classes are held at the corporation, anything is possible. It is not unusual for Larry Ellison, Bill Gates or Michael Eisner to check in on a class and answer a few questions.