UH offers long-distance MBA instruction

By Bob Golfen
Special to The Advertiser

For more than a year and a half, Ernest Magaoay has been working toward his MBA at University of Hawai'i at Manoa, while sitting alone in a classroom on Lana'i.

Phil Thorngren of Wailuku, a student in the MBA program, takes advantage of the long-distance instruction that operates with a two-way TV system and includes a Web site with chat rooms. Christie Wilson • The Honolulu Advertiser

They're the vanguard class of the university's MBA Program for the Neighbor Islands, in which students can gain their graduate degrees without having to travel to the main campus on O'ahu. Using two-way television systems and other technology, the classes are linked with instructors whose lectures are beamed into the classrooms.

Now at the halfway point, the far-flung MBA students are comfortable with the technology, and give a solid thumbs up for the program that brought post-graduate education to their home islands.

"It's been fantastic," said Magaoay, 39, First Hawaiian Bank's Lana'i branch manager. "This is something I always wanted to do, and when the opportunity finally came, I just took advantage of it."

Magaoay is the only student on Lana'i, which explains his solitary classroom experience. But still, he can see and hear the professor and the other class members through his monitor. He is the only one who doesn't have a camera trained on him, though, so while he can see what everybody else is doing, neither the lecturer nor the other students can see him, as they can see each other.

For the first class of students, the Neighbor Island program is working well and filling a need that was never addressed before, said Marsha Anderson, assistant dean of the College of Business.

"The bottom line for us is that this program gives a lot of people a chance to get an MBA who wouldn't have been able to," Anderson said. "They were limited geographically, and we can overcome that now."

The university's Information Technology Services program provides the two-way TV system and the camera operators. The university also set up a Web site for the MBA program with chat rooms for students and instructors. Students can also communicate with instructors via e-mail.

After some teething problems, the technology has been working well, and everybody involved has adapted their teaching and learning styles, Anderson said.

"It really works," she said. "It's frustrating in some ways, but it's exciting to find out what you can accomplish using the technology."

Finance instructor Judith Mills said that teaching in front of a camera instead of live students requires her to compensate for the lack of "crowd reaction."

"Often when you're teaching, you can tell how well you're doing by the restlessness of the room and the sounds that are coming back to you," Mills said. "Those kinds of signals you don't even think about turn out to be fairly important. You have to learn some new skills to make sure you're getting your point across."

After the initial discomfort, she now can use the camera to enhance her teaching, she said, such as having the camera operator zoom in for close-ups of written instructions or equations.

"Any new technology can be formidible," Mills said. "You have to learn what the limitations are and what the advantages are."

Mills believes that the use of such remote learning will expand, not just in Hawaii but worldwide, with institutions of higher learning competing in classrooms without walls or logistic concerns.

"I suspect that schools that offer very good programs will become very competitive because they could reach classrooms everywhere," she said.

Like Magaoay, most of the island students are professional people with full-time jobs, Anderson said, so classtime had to be created that works around business schedules. Currently, the three hours of instruction are conducted every Tuesday and Friday evenings. Classes are conducted at community college campuses on the neighbor islands.

On Maui, Wayne Yamamura is one of 23 students who attend classes. The insurance professional says the remote-classroom system has challenges but also some very good points. He misses the comaraderie that would exist among all the MBA students, instead of just those he takes classes with on Maui, as well as the difficulties of communicating with the students on the other islands.

"It's definitely more difficult to deal with people over long distance," said Yamamura, 43. "But I think it prepares you for the real world — teleconferencing, e-mail, faxes. The group projects definitely introduce you to what it takes to get people together to get a project done."

One advantage is that e-mailed tests and papers to the instructors cuts the amount of time it takes to get the grades back, compared with paper copies, Yamamura said. He also thinks he can communicate well with the instructors, perhaps better than in on-campus situations.

The instructors can deliver lectures from the Manoa campus or any of the remote classrooms, other than Lanai because of the lack of camera equipment. Recently, Mills was teaching from the Hilo classroom to students on the other islands.

The first class of students is scheduled to graduate in December 2002, and if there is continued student demand, the business school expects to start up a second Neighbor Island MBA program at that time, Anderson said.

Overall, the College of Business has more than 300 full- and part-time MBA students, she said, including those in Neighbor Island, executive, Japan-focused and China-focused programs.

Correction: Phil Thorngren's last name was misspelled in a photo caption in a previous version of this story.