10/23/95 VIRTUAL B-SCHOOLS

VIRTUAL B-SCHOOLS
Beaming classes to companies from Daewoo to Disney
After a long, frenetic day at work, weary managers file into yet another corporate conference room. They sit and stare at the video-screen image of a business school professor who is hundreds or thousands of miles away. The teacher can't see the students. If they want to ask a question, they must first push a button on a small numeric keypad in front of them.
The executive classroom of the future? Maybe. Harvard business school has beamed some of its professorial stars, such as strategy guru Michael Porter, into alumni clubs around the world. The University of Michigan offers customized MBA degrees via videoconferencing to managers at Daewoo Corp. in Korea and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. in Hong Kong. Sloan School Dean Glen L. Urban is making ``long-distance learning'' a key priority, while Dean Paul Danos at Dartmouth College's Amos Tuck School plans to use satellite-video classrooms to more effectively bring the outside business world onto his isolated Hanover (N.H.) campus.
CUSTOM COURSES. Suddenly, almost everybody in the world of executive education is talking about long-distance learning. Business schools see it as a way to better spread their resources and for their faculty to have more impact. ``The new techniques and technologies of distance learning hold the potential to revolutionize executive education,'' says Alan F. White, senior associate dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.
Long-distance learning is one more facet of a trend that has been reshaping the world of executive education for years: the relentless drive to make mid-career instruction more practical, meaningful, and efficient. Companies continue to demand that executive education achieve specific, real-world goals and immediate payoffs. More B-schools and companies are collaborating to create custom courses, with content designed specifically for the employees of a single company. Increasingly, business schools are ditching long multiweek programs in favor of shorter courses to fit the time constraints of harried managers. After a 38-year run, MIT's Sloan School last year canceled its eight-week Program for Senior Executives because it could not get enough participants to enroll in it.
But it's the satellite classroom that is drawing the most attention. So far, the most ambitious effort at high-tech executive education is being mustered by Westcott Communications Inc. and eight business schools ranging from Babson College to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The venture, Executive Education Network, already boasts nearly 100 corporate classrooms at such companies as Eastman Kodak, Walt Disney, Texas Instruments, and Storage Technology. ``I think this can be very big,'' says Jack T. Smith, president of Westcott, an education and training company based in Carrollton, Tex. ``Building this to 500 corporate sites is not out of reach.''
Why would anyone seriously interested in business education want to gaze into a TV tube? Corporate America's years-long starvation diet has led to the shedding of tens of thousands of managers. Few companies can now afford to lose the survivors to weeks or months of off-site executive education courses. As one chief executive puts it: ``If we can do without someone for a week, we can probably do without them for good.''
NIGHT SCHOOL. Yet with vast changes altering the landscape of business, many managers find themselves lacking the skills and knowledge to tackle new and ever more demanding responsibilities on the job. They may not have time for education anymore, the thinking goes, but they need it more than ever.
So more companies and business schools are exploring the possibility of offering managers live, interactive classes delivered via satellite to corporate sites--often after work hours. The University of Michigan's business school is working with a consortium of companies headed by British Telecom to deliver live video courses next spring in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. At Westcott, dozens of B-school professors, working with an Emmy-winning producer, are putting on makeup and polishing their classroom lectures for TV delivery.
Such ventures also give business schools the opportunity to experiment with technology--and broaden their revenue streams. ``Is this a moneymaking venture?'' asks Robert E. Mittelstaedt Jr., vice-dean of executive education at Wharton. ``Absolutely. But it's also an experiment in how education will be delivered in the future.'' Wharton is offering a basic finance course for non-financial managers. Carnegie Mellon University is serving up a program on the management of technology and information. Pennsylvania State University has a program on human resources.
For companies, schooling by satellite is clearly efficient. Electronic Data Systems Corp., which already has registered ``several hundred'' of its managers for these satellite programs, views them as a way to offer executive education to far greater numbers of its employees. ``Cost is an important advantage to this,'' says Robert H. Keahey, director of professional development at EDS. ``More important than that is the variety of universities and topics we will be able to offer a very large audience. It would be impossible to send as many people at EDS to universities for these courses.''
The first of Westcott's 13 managerial courses went live on Oct. 10. More than 300 managers, at $800 a pop, sat in their companies' conference rooms to see a Southern Methodist University B-school professor begin a 10-session mini-MBA program for middle managers. For the next 20 weeks, they will assemble at 5 p.m. every other Tuesday for three hours of business basics, from understanding financial statements to building and sustaining competitive advantage.
The classes are being broadcast from a studio in Carrollton to office buildings in far-flung locales. In each corporate classroom, managers watch the professor on a video screen and speak to him via a microphone in a keypad on their desks. The pad also can be used to alert the teacher to questions and to punch in answers to queries posed by the professor. Teachers, though, aren't able to see their students--or their dazed looks when they aren't following the lectures. Instead, a ``flag'' button allows them to anonymously inform the professor that his ideas may be over their heads. A computer screen in front of the teacher lets him know what percentage of the students aren't getting it.
DRAWBACKS. For this bit of high-tech education, companies pay a $2,000 monthly fee and tuition ranging from $165 to $800 for each manager they enroll in programs. Westcott supplies all the equipment except the video monitors and sets up the classroom. Westcott's Smith estimates that a company needs to enroll 30 to 50 managers in its courses each year to make the schooling cost-effective. Universities providing the professors receive a royalty of about 10% of the tuition or a negotiated flat fee.
The technology has its obvious limitations. Wharton's Mittelstaedt, an enthusiastic supporter of classes by satellite, believes they probably aren't a good idea for upper-tier executives. ``At senior levels, executives learn by interaction,'' he says. ``We sell perspective to them, not skills.'' George J. Siedel, an associate dean at the University of Michigan, believes that the new technology may be best for what he calls ``knowledge dissemination'' but not what he refers to as ``human development,'' such as teaching managers how to lead and build effective teams. ``I don't think you can get these skills from a talking head on a television screen,'' he says.
Some corporate directors of executive education agree. ``There's a place for it,'' says Dick Sethe, assistant director of executive education at AT&T, ``but true learning is a socialization process. You learn with and from people. The deepest learning occurs through failure, reflection, and feedback.''
Nor are the best classroom professors always the best TV teachers. ``You have to put the right people on the screen or you lose the audience right away,'' says Karen Arden, who heads executive education at the University of Southern California. ``I don't think this is going to replace classroom learning, but it is going to supplement it.''
Indeed, most of the courses are highly compressed versions of longer programs. Wharton's Finance & Accounting for the Non-Financial Manager is usually a four-and-one-half-day program with 23 hours of instruction costing $4,550. The satellite version will be a trio of three-hour segments for $600, requiring Wharton to significantly scale back course content.
Even so, the satellite classroom will make business courses from professors at the top schools far more accessible to managers, no matter where they are. It's likely to dramatically alter the field of executive education--and extend the work day for many harried managers.
By John A. Byrne in New York