It is a fact that online universities did not come into being until too recently. After all, the Net was not in existence before the 20th century. Yet, the idea for these universities came into being ages ago, in the 1700s.
It is distance learning itself that is not new. For instance, one can look at the development of a lesson plan by a man back then who was teaching shorthand to people through mailed letters. The snailmail that we rarely use nowadays was the channel for his program.
London's own main university asserts that it was leading the pack when it came to distance learning at the time, for it was the first to boast a correspondence program. In the United States, the University of Chicago pioneered the concept of correspondence studies in 1892 to promote the education to the public that was implemented by Columbia University. The new formats were embraced too by educators in the land Down Under soon enough.
The old lesson-in-the-mail system was overtaken by video education soon after that. The latter part of the past century saw increasing interest and rapid growth in this sector. By 1996, there was already an accredited college: Jones International.
And as for the MBA, some claim it really began when Dartmouth put up what would be the first graduate business school in the world. To people taking the course, they were taking not an MBA but a Master of Science in Commerce instead. Soon after, Harvard was already offering MBA classes for just under a hundred starting pupils.
Certain persons had their doubts: at the end of the 1950s, there were already allegations of the MBA classes containing largely off-tangent topics. Indeed, the program was even lambasted as a useless qualification, making it hardly a qualification at all. There was thus very little credibility to the degree back then.
That was why the masters in business administration began to include the core courses of the undergraduate, to some extent, in order to combat the general perception. Specializing in a particular area suddenly became an option. This then provided students with a balance of management and subject expertise.
Unfortunately, the critique did not exactly stop: it simply changed. The true arena of business apparently tended to confound degree-holders who had been taught in a more sanitized environment with more controllable parameters. The problem too was that several schools hired professors who did not have experiential knowledge of their subjects.
The MBA became less desirable to HR officers. Colleges saw the need for fresh alterations. The result is the MBA you see now, which is still being perfected and developed by experts both in and out of the academe.
Online MBA programs are continuously adapting to the changing needs of the corporate world. Even now,
online universities as well as offline ones are making new modifications to the MBA programs they offer. This is why it may be wise to seek out schools whose MBAs are reflective of the latest trend in the industry.
