The Open University of Andorra and La Salle Business Engineering School in Barcelona, Spain announces:
An Experiential MBA program
offered on line
In 2001, Roger Schank and his team of educational design innovators created a new kind of master's degree program at Carnegie Mellon University's new Silicon Valley campus in software engineering, e-business, learning sciences and other areas. These degree programs were delivered via the new Story Centered Curriculum approach that makes all learning experiential and uses learning by doing as its primary learning methodology. Carnegie Mellon's Silicon Valley campus offered no classes, gave no examinations, and in fact offered no courses. All curricula consist of a series of projects done by a team of students working together with a mentor using a detailed web site that offers the background knowledge, assignment, and help, to get students started. Students are expected to produce deliverables on a certain date that reflect the kinds of deliverables they would have to produce in the real world jobs for which this masters degree program prepares them. After a year in this program students are ready to go to work and readily employable. The Carnegie Mellon program has been so successful that the standard program offered at Carnegie Mellon's main campus has often been replaced by the Story Centered offering developed for the Silicon Valley campus. The program can be delivered on line or face to face. How students and mentors talk to each other is a matter of preference not one of educational significance. All important materials are on the web (or available in books.)
Now the Open University of Andorra, in conjunction with the Business and Engineering School (BES) of La Salle University in Barcelona announces the launch of a Story Centered Curriculum in Business designed by the same team that Carnegie Mellon employed. It is an MBA program but one that is meant to prepare students to start their own businesses, work in innovative business environments, or work in their own family small businesses. The program gives students business experience rather than business theory. The program will be delivered around the world to students in any country. La Salle in Spain will grant the degree. Mentors will be local people who speak the local language. The web site is in English however. In the first year, prior to there being sufficient mentors so that we can offer local mentors in every country, the languages for students and mentors will be limited to English, Spanish, Catalan, and French. Students can work face to face if there are enough in the same city. Otherwise they can work on line. Either way, except for daily communication, everything else is the same in either version. The program can be taken over one or two years.
English speakers who would like to enroll in the MBA program at La Salle should send an e-mail to Patti Perrelli (pattip@socraticarts.com) and they will be contacted
The MBA program is comprised of a series of stories that reflect what world class business people understand to be the key issues in the development of relevant business experience. Students work in teams to complete deliverables at various points in each story. There are no lectures, no classes and no tests.
Story 1: Finance: "Cash Crisis" - Analyze and Solve Financial Problems
A family that owns a winery has hired a consulting firm to help them determine why their bank loan request has been denied. The students first conduct financial analyses to determine problems within the business, and then develop solutions to address the problems, and write a report outlining the solutions, including five-year financial projections
Story 2: Technology: "Going Online" - Take a small business online
Students are contacted by a fictional investor who is interested in starting an online business selling gift baskets. They then define functional and non-functional requirements for the site they must design. Â The final step in the process is a review of proposals from a set of vendors who could build the site the students designed.
Story 3: Marketing: Launching an Internet business
Students plan a new on line business. Students work with a venture capital firm to launch a new company, iSing.com (a social network for amateur performers). The team will do all the tasks required for a successful launch - including writing and presenting a business plan, developing a marketing strategy, planning operations, and finance.
Story 4: Operations: Reengineer a supply chain
The multinational company now asks the students to reengineer their supply chain, considering people, processes, and technology (with a particular focus on ERP). Students produce a reengineered process with an accompanying change management plan
Story 5: Entrepreneurship: Investment Readiness
Students will help a small tech company prepare for a second round of fund raising to grow internationally. They will analyze the current situation and prepare a business plan attractive enough to motivate new investors. Students will negotiate the term sheet and the shareholders agreement with VC firms.
Course 6: Ethical Governance and Change Management: The Story of a 21st Century Business
Students immerse themselves in the story of an international pharmaceutical company engaged in a hostile takeover of a smaller, but highly successful competitor. Students experience the tough negotiations, the elimination of dedicated and talented individuals, and the painful shuffling of roles and responsibilities that accompany major change in a modern corporation. Students also confront the complicated (and sometimes conflicting) relationship between social responsibility, legal responsibility, and profit motive, as they witness the company's attempt to establish a new research facility in a blighted town as a consequence of the merger.
Course 7: Selling and Implementing Solutions
Students begin their work as new project managers at a premier event-planning company, World Class Events. Students begin by qualifying and prioritizing opportunities to propose work to prospective clients, pitching to senior management which of the proposals should receive the greatest budget, based on potential profitability, likelihood of winning, and other relevant considerations. Students learn they will be proposing work for an automotive event entailing a multi-city caravan, as well as a showcasing and test drive event for electric cars. Students create a project scope document for the sales effort, first planning and attending a simulated meeting with event-planning experts to determine a vision for the event, including risks and open questions for the client. They then engage in a role-play call with the client, introducing World Class Events and clarifying the project vision.
As in every Story Centered Curriculum, key thinking skills being taught in the context of the specific content include communication (written and oral), teamwork, human relations, diagnosis, causation, negotiation, judgement, evaluation, and planning.