Candidate Info: Quality Management

Our Top Priority

As the academic adviser for Executive Programmes, I'm responsible for collaborating closely with Olga Meglinskaya (Curriculum Delivery Manager) to continuously improve the quality of our MBA, as well as mentoring students through their Live Case and BUSI 540 professional consulting engagements. This is a responsibility that our team takes seriously, maybe best indicated by my dedicated position for quality. We incorporate processes of planning, doing, monitoring and acting on lessons gain from one term to the next and one year to the next. All of the following initiatives fall under the umbrella concept of Quality of Learning as specified by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and Equis accrediting institutions.

• working from a Graduate Student Profile linked to our coursework and mentored experiences

• emphasizing consistent themes across courses: e.g., educating the whole person with specific focus on character and the quality of students' conceptual reasoning abilities

• maintaining small and active classrooms, as well as encouraging the involvement of all students in discussions

• balancing student workloads across courses to assure the doability of assignments / assessments

• selecting students with sufficient experience to contribute to the classroom experience; emphasizing diversity among students; and not reducing students to a summary statistic (GMAT score of questionable validity.

• selecting lecturers (from around the world) with both scholarly grounding and practical experience in their area of expertise: see Denis Kobzev, Paul Hansen, Julia Richardson and Beth Rose

• monitoring students' performance in our classes on a near weekly basis: to assure their success (e.g., providing mentoring help if needed) in each course

• adhering to the scholarly literature on assessment and student feedback

• conducting beginning and end-of-term reviews of each course: and using these reviews to improve the quality of our programme from term to term and year to year

• offering professional development workshops tangential to core courses; for instance to building networking and presentation skills

• and, benchmarking our courses (e.g., our strategy course against the London School of Business), and evaluate how well we stack up.  Very well, thank you!  Recent reports from our students' participation in the "Doing Business in India" and International Exchange at Duke MBA affirm the quality / rigor of our Otago MBA core courses.