[photopress:MBA_Joshua_Coibb.jpg,full,alignright]Teaching degree courses can be . . . interesting. Paris-based HEC School of Management began offering an executive MBA in Beijing last year — the EMBA that managers gain after considerable work experience.
Joshua Kobb, HEC’s director of international programs said, ‘One of the big surprises to us is that students on Chinese E.M.B.A.s party a lot. Executive education and training is seen as a reward, a perk.
‘Participants would say, “Can we finish at 5:30? Then we’re going to go have a banquet at a restaurant.”
Joshua Kobb said, ‘It’s a learning process for us. To be successful in China, you need to be flexible and adapt — but at the same time, you have to ensure the academics behind it.’
China’s government authorized local universities to grant M.B.A.’s in 1991. There are now 95 universities offering the degrees; at least two dozen of the programs are run by foreign business schools as joint ventures with Chinese universities, including an executive MBA offered by Nanjing University with the U.S.’s Cornell University, and the China Europe International Business School, a joint venture in Shanghai between Shanghai Jiaotong University and the European Foundation for Management Development.
Most of its students are senior executives.
Some problems happen when some executives were sending secretaries or other staff to sit in for them in class. Joshua Kobb said, ‘They’d say, “I’m very busy, I’m going to send someone to take notes today.”In their minds, training means passive learning. We have to remind them it’s active learning: You have to be there — there’s a lot of group-discussion work.
In 2005, Insead, which has campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore, hired Boston Consulting Group to study the potential of China and India. The study concluded that the market for business education in China was valued at $500 million annually.
Insead last year set up a joint-venture EMBA program with Tsinghua University. Students do part of the program at Tsinghua, and part of it at the Singapore campus.
Maintaining the school’s accreditation with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, a U.S.-based accreditation body, also is an issue.
The AACSB says it encourages innovative approaches to educational activities, and partnerships and strategic alliances can be part of that. ‘We don’t require, in a partnership arrangement, that all the faculty come from the accredited school,’ but it is up to the accredited school to prove to the AACSB that any faculty from, say, a Chinese university, is qualified to teach their program.’
Source: Wall Street Journal where you will not be able to read the whole splendid article by Chris Prystay. However, it is available in full on Beyond the Curtain. It is well worth downloading. It shows the problems and potentials of EMBA degrees.