Jeanette Purcell, chief executive of the Association of MBAs, talking of the Open University Business School said, ‘It was probably the pioneer for open-learning and distance-learning approaches, and the number of students who have passed through its courses has been phenomenal — good students who otherwise would not have considered an MBA. It really has been quite revolutionary.’
The school’s third and current dean, James Fleck, said, ‘I was blown away by the whole concept when I came here. The learning experience is designed not by one professor but by a team of people creating the materials. Then there are around 1,000 tutors — 300 of them in Russia — helping the students. It’s very intense.’
Some might say that the school is a little late into the global market, which has been flooded with competitors in the past 20 years. These days many MBAs are taken completely online. IBM, for example, has just partnered with the Boston-based Northeastern University to provide an online MBA course for its Indian employees.
The Independent reports one student as saying, ‘The OU Business School is a broad church. Perhaps I didn’t get exactly the networking experience I might have got with a full-time degree – but I did meet some really interesting people, the kind I never would have encountered otherwise.’