{"id":1851,"date":"2014-05-04T12:02:25","date_gmt":"2014-05-04T16:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1851"},"modified":"2014-05-04T12:02:25","modified_gmt":"2014-05-04T16:02:25","slug":"blogging-and-the-changing-world-of-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/05\/04\/blogging-and-the-changing-world-of-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging and the Changing World of Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a blogger, I have been a failure in the last six months. \u00a0I barely have enough time to tweet, let alone sit down for these extensively researched, tightly edited, and deeply insightful missives that characterize my blog. \u00a0I tell you, 1005 words on finding love through optimization<\/a> doesn’t just happen!<\/p>\n

\"phdtime\"<\/a>I have my excuses, of course. \u00a0As the fabulous PHD Comics points out<\/a>, most of us academics seem somewhat overbooked, despite the freedom to set much of our schedule. \u00a0I am not alone in being congenitally unable to turn down “opportunities” when they come by. \u00a0“Help hire a Norwegian professor?” Sounds fun! “Be the external examiner for a French habilitation degree?” I am sure I’ll learn a lot! \u00a0“Referee another paper?” How long can that take? \u00a0“Fly to Australia for a few days to do a research center review?” \u00a0Count me in! \u00a0And that was just four weeks in February.<\/p>\n

All this is in addition to my day job that includes a more-than-healthy dose of academic administration. \u00a0Between 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.<\/p>\n

And then something new comes along. \u00a0For me, this newness is something I had a hand in putting together: the Tepper School’s new FlexMBA<\/a> program. \u00a0This program offers our flagship MBA program in a hybrid online\/onsite structure. \u00a0Every 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. \u00a0This is followed by six weeks of mixed synchronous and asynchronous course material. \u00a0Asynchronous material is stuff the students can do in their own time: videos, readings, assignments, and so on. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0The course ends with exams or other evaluations back on campus before starting the next courses.<\/p>\n

Our commitment is to offer the same program as our full-time residential MBA and our part-time in-Pittsburgh MBA. \u00a0So this means, the same courses, faculty, learning objectives, and evaluations that our local students take.<\/p>\n

We started this program last September with 29 students, and so far it has gone great. \u00a0The students are highly motivated, smart, hard-working, and engaged. \u00a0And the faculty have been amazing: they have put in tons of work to adapt their courses to this new structure. \u00a0Fortunately, we have some top-notch staff to keep things working. \u00a0Unlike some other MBA programs, we have not partnered with any outside firm on this. \u00a0If we are going to offer our degree, we want it to be\u00a0our<\/em> degree.<\/p>\n

I have just finished my own course in this program. \u00a0I teach our “Statistical Decision Making” course. \u00a0This is a core course all MBA students take and revolves around multiple regression and simulation (the interesting relationships between these topics can wait for another day). \u00a0This is not the most natural course for me: \u00a0my research and background is more \u00a0on the optimization side, but I very much enjoy the course. \u00a0And teaching this course has made clear to me the real promise of the hot phrase “business analytics”: \u00a0the best of business analytics will combine the predictive analytics of statistics and machine learning with the prescriptive analytics of optimization, again a topic for another day.<\/p>\n

My initial meeting with the students concentrated on an overview of the course and an introduction to the software through some inspiring cases. \u00a0We then moved on the the six-week distance phase. \u00a0Each of the six modules that make up a course is composed of four to eight topics. \u00a0For instance, one of my modules on multiple regression includes the topic “Identifying and Handling Muliticollinearity”. \u00a0(Briefly: multicollearity occurs when you do regression with two or more variables that can substitute for each other; imagine predicting height using both left-foot-length and right-foot-length as data). \u00a0That section of the module consists of<\/p>\n