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The University of Otago Business School’s Master of Business Administration degree is now being offered as an online course, as well as on-campus from early next year.

The Master of Business Administration degree is the leading MBA programme within New Zealand, with a focus on teaching its students’ professional development and giving practical experience within businesses and networking activities. These skills are now being introduced as part of the newly developed Otago Online MBA, where students can partake in the course in an online, part-time format from anywhere in the world.

The Otago Online MBA has been designed along the lines of being administrated as a small, private, online course, which is similar to the online course format that schools such as Harvard use. The format involves lectures being streamed live, so students enrolled in the online version of the course can still participate in class discussion, as they would if they were on campus. The Director of Executive Programmes Ian Lafferty said, “There will be a very high level of engagement among the students and teaching team and we are offering a lot more than traditional distance courses where students study in isolation.” Students can also re-watch the lecture recordings if they happen to miss a class.

The online version of the Otago MBA has had several changes made to it to accommodate for being an online course. It must be taken part-time and takes two-and-a-half years, instead of the on-campus time of 15 months. The two-and-a-half year course is made up of seven-week blocks within which one paper is taught at a time. This is followed by a business research project that students take part in.
Lafferty stresses that the online MBA programme is still a high-class degree, but it is just reduced to a part-time course and can be taken from all over the world. “The difference is we can offer this to students who live anywhere and choose to work full-time and study part-time.” The Otago Online MBA is essentially identical to that of its on-campus version, with it being “important to note that this is the same degree as the one delivered to those who choose to live and study in Dunedin. It is the same curriculum, the same lecturers, and the same assessment,” Mr Lafferty said.

The Otago Online MBA programme starts in May 2015, with applications now being accepted for the course. More information can be found at otago.ac.nz/mbaotago.