External Program Reviewer s Report Master of Business Administration Program (EMBA and MBA) College of Business CSU Monterey Bay

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1 External Program Reviewer s Report Master of Business Administration Program (EMBA and MBA) College of Business CSU Monterey Bay Submitted by: Donna Wiley, Ph.D. Senior Director, Graduate Studies and Academic Programs CSU East Bay August 13, P age

2 This external review of the CSU Monterey Bay MBA program, which includes the Executive MBA program and the traditional MBA program, was based on the program Self-Study and 5 Year Program Review document, discussions with college and program administration, telephone interviews with adjunct faculty and students, and a demonstration of the course learning management system. The EMBA and MBA programs are fully online programs, delivered in conjunction with Colloquy, which manages the online learning system as well as the recruiting and admissions process. Students in each program are admitted each of four terms per year, taking one sixunit course each term. Following are my observations and recommendations in the areas of program mission and goals, program curriculum and outcomes, student learning, faculty composition, student satisfaction, and resources. Please note that my review focuses primarily on program administration and delivery, as a second external reviewer focused more closely on curriculum. Throughout this report, I will refer to both programs as the MBA programs, unless specifically referring to one particular program. Program Mission and Goals According to the Self-Study, the MBA reflects and promotes the University Vision Statement in that it is distinctive in serving the diverse people of California, especially the working class and historically underserved and low-income populations and communities in the Tri-County region. Further, the Self-Study states that the MBA program targets a student population that reflects the demographic cultural and background differences necessary to ensure a diverse community of unique individuals. However, the MBA program is a fully online program, with a number of students who are from outside the Tri-County region (only one student in the list of students included in the Self-Study was from that area) and who (typically?) hold high-level managerial positions in their organizations. (Student demographics in terms of racial and ethnic backgrounds were not included in the Self-Study so I cannot evaluate the diversity of the student population.) Therefore, the linkage between the MBA program and the CSUMB vision is not clearly evident. This is not to imply that the program should not be serving its current student population or that it is not contributing to the CSUMB mission and vision. However, the program may want to re-evaluate how it communicates this linkage to both internal and external stakeholders, and to the larger community. According to the MBA Self-Study, the College of Business and MBA program missions were developed in While an inclusion of a five-year plan for the program does not appear to be a required component of the CSUMB program review process, I think that development of such a plan would be beneficial for the program at this critical juncture. With the recent official 2 P age

3 formation of the College of Business, the hiring of a new Dean for the College, and new university administration in place, development of strategic plans at all levels are now in process, so it is a perfect time for the MBA program to develop its goals for the coming five years in alignment with university and college strategic plans. Clearly, attainment of AACSB accreditation is first and foremost as a goal of the College, and a number of issues identified in this program review will be critical to achievement of that goal. The MBA program embeds seven core competencies into each of the eight courses in the curriculum. These include all but one (service learning) of the CSUMB s core values. This is illustrated in the detailed mapping of the alignment of these core competencies to each set of course objectives. However, it was mentioned in the discussion with program administration that these competencies may not be specifically taught in the program, so it was not clear that students were indeed developing them. This issue, along with the broader issue of assessment of the core competencies and MLOs (major learning outcomes) will be discussed in more detail in the following sections. Program Curriculum and Outcomes The MBA programs are comprised of a rigorous set of eight six-unit courses. These courses are developed by course managers for each of these courses, and faculty who are teaching each course use the same structured syllabi, course content and assignments. This allows the program to maintain a high level of quality control over the curriculum, which is particularly important given the number of adjunct faculty teaching in the program. This, along with the structured course management system, also provides a consistent look and feel to each of the courses in the online environment. I was very impressed with the level of detail contained in the course syllabi. I asked whether there had been any faculty pushback from using standardized course content (as our faculty resist even choosing a common textbook), but that does not seem to have been an issue. Both the tenure-track and adjunct faculty who I spoke to appear to be very satisfied with the course materials. And the Economics faculty member pointed out that he does update each course offering with current economics topics of interest. A detailed discussion of program outcomes is included in the following section. Student Learning As mentioned above, the MBA program has identified seven core competencies which, according to the Self-Study, are embedded throughout the curriculum. The Self-Study provides a mapping of how these are aligned with each course objective in each course. However, only one of these core competencies has been assessed, which has been the only formal direct assessment effort undertaken by the MBA program. The results of the critical thinking assessment project were very similar to the results of a similar project undertaking at CSU East 3 P age

4 Bay. Specifically, the MBA program s assessment using a critical thinking rubric showed that students performed lower than was desired on the critical thinking dimensions. The program s conclusions, again very similar to our own, are that this may be the result of a number of factors, including the fact that students are never intentionally taught critical thinking skills, and that the assignments used to collect student artifacts may or may not have elicited the types of critical thinking assessed by the rubric. The MBA program has identified a number of strategies to close the loop based on these results. In addition to the seven core competencies, the MBA program has also identified a large number of MLOs. They are grouped into eight areas, which are identical to the eight courses in the program. Each area of MLOs are comprised of a number of outcomes, such that the MLO statements are to a large extent restatements of the course descriptions, reworded to include outcome verbs such as understand and apply, with multiple outcomes included in each MLO area. The Self Study also includes elaborate course objectives for each course and a set of rubrics used to evaluate a number of course assignments. There was no assessment plan that specified when each of the core competencies or MLOs were to be assessed or what assessment method/measure will be used to assess each of these. In addition, this reviewer found the number of core competencies and MLOs to be somewhat overwhelming. It was not clear exactly which of these would or should be assessed or how. Should the program s assessment efforts be focused on assessing the core competencies or the MLOs or both? It would certainly be an exhausting effort to systematically assess all of them. Since the core competencies overlap with the University s core values, is there a universitywide effort to assess these, which would leave the program free to concentrate on assessment its MLO s? If not, could the core competencies be incorporated as program values and not be directly assessed? My recommendation is to streamline the MLOs to a realistically assessable number. (Typically between 5 7 program learning outcomes is recommended). The program is apparently already using a number of rubrics for grading although the Self Study did not explicitly explain how these rubrics are being used. If these rubrics could be directly aligned with MLOs, this would make assessment data collection and analysis quite manageable. Another idea is to apply these or similar rubrics designed to assess each MLO to various assignments produced in the capstone course, Business Strategy. According to one of the instructors of the course that I spoke to, it would be very feasible to identify various components of the simulation activity and use these for assessment purposes. I would also encourage the program to consult Bloom s Taxonomy if/when the MLOs are revised to ensure that higher level skills appropriate to graduate education, such as analysis, synthesis or evaluation, are being developed and assessed, as opposed to understanding, which is one of the lowest level skills in this hierarchy. 4 P age

5 Faculty Composition The CSUMB College of Business currently employs 6 tenure-track faculty members. All of these have appropriate degrees and experience to teach in the MBA program. However, with the growth in enrollment of the MBA program, from 5 students in 2008 to 199 in 2013, the number and percentage of program courses taught by TT faculty has dropped precipitously, from 4 courses and 100% taught by TT faculty in 2008 to 58 courses with 7% taught by TT faculty in The program has done an excellent job of selecting, orienting and integrating the adjunct faculty instructing in the MBA program. One of the adjunct faculty members I spoke to said it was the best, most organized online program he had taught in. However, this ratio of tenure-track to adjunct faculty is not going to be acceptable as the College moves towards gaining AACSB accreditation. Obviously one source of the problem is the small size of the current TT faculty. This will be solved in part by the aggressive hiring of TT faculty by the College for and However, even this extremely significant increase of TT faculty will not completely solve the problem. New faculty joining the College will likely get assigned time to establish their scholarship program. It would be counterintuitive to, at the same time, give them overload teaching to teach in the MBA program. It may also have negative impacts on their scholarship productivity, so this should be closely monitored. Other factors contributing to the current faculty imbalance are the structure of the program in terms of cohort admission and enrollment and course design. The program currently admits cohorts of both the MBA and EMBA programs in each of four terms each year. Each cohort takes each of the eight classes in the program in a lock-step fashion. This essentially obligates the program to offer each of the eight courses each quarter as each cohort of both programs moves through the program. This is true even though the cohort size of the EMBA program has been quite small for the last few years (several terms with cohort sizes of 7 or 8 students). The current course design also contributes to the tenure-track/adjunct faculty balance. Each course is a six-semester course that is offered in a ten-week term, and for tenure-track faculty, these are taught primarily on overload. This means that a faculty teaching a full 12-unit load plus one MBA course would be teaching 18 semester units. During my discussions with program administration, it was explained that tenure-track faculty are only used during the two 10-week terms that partially overlap with the regular semester, so they are not teaching this load for an entire term. However, this means that during the two terms that do overlap completely, there are no tenure-track faculty teaching in the program. It also means that during the terms when they do teach in the program, for the weeks that do overlap, faculty will have a very heavy teaching load. This may also have a negative impact on their scholarship as well as university service. Again, this will need to be closely monitored to ensure that all tenure-track faculty are maintaining their academic qualifications. 5 P age

6 Several ideas for increasing the ratio of tenure-track to adjunct faculty were discussed during my visit. These include: reducing the number of intakes per year for both programs, particularly for the EMBA program in which cohort sizes have been extremely small; reconfiguring the current course structure into smaller unit courses; and having tenure-track faculty, particularly new faculty, teach in the program on load. It should also be noted that ideas related to increasing the marketability/viability of the EMBA program were also discussed. Each of these options has its own pros and cons and consequences (obvious and unintended) for other aspects of the program, so program administration will have to weigh the options carefully to determine which solution(s) work best for the program, faculty and students. Student Satisfaction The Self-Study included the results of a satisfaction survey conducted with both current students and alumni. All of the responses to survey questions were very positive, including overall satisfaction with the MBA program, satisfaction with the curriculum and faculty, and willingness to recommend the program to others. No particular areas of program strength or areas for improvement were specified in the survey results. The high level of satisfaction was echoed by the student that I spoke to who was extremely happy with the program, found the faculty and the program content to be demanding but appropriate, and the online environment to be very easy to navigate, even on mobile devices. Resources and Support Faculty resources were discussed extensively above. The program provides excellent support to faculty and students in terms of on-campus staff support as well as technical support provided by Colloquy. As mentioned above, students and faculty are very satisfied with the learning management system provided by Colloquy. Students also have access to online library resources through the CSUMB Library and databases. I was not provided with financial data for the program, but understand that revenues are split between Colloquy, CSUMB Extension and the College of Business (as well as cost recovery to other CSUMB units whose resources this program utilizes). As with all self-support programs in the CSU, all of these financial issues must be closely monitored to ensure that the program is financially viable and that all system regulations regarding self-support programs and finances are followed. Conclusions From my review of the CSUMB MBA program Self-Study and from my conversations with program administration, faculty, students and staff, my conclusion is that the program overall is a very strong program. Its strengths are a very dedicated administration, faculty leadership and 6 P age

7 committed adjunct faculty and program staff, a robust curriculum, and a well-functioning online infrastructure. Additionally, the campus has a strong and supportive administrative team that understands the strengths and challenges of the program. I have identified areas that require further analysis and action throughout this review, but to summarize, the two main areas that should be of top priority for the coming period are the development and implementation of a cohesive assessment strategy and the development of a strategy to reduce the imbalance between tenure-track and adjunct faculty participation in the program. A number of alternative strategies were discussed, each with its own set of pros and cons, so it will be up to program administration and faculty, in conjunction with university administration, to arrive at the optimal solutions for the program. Finally, I encourage the program to develop its five-year plan in conjunction with the university s academic plan as well as the college s strategic plan as these develop over the course of the coming year. I congratulate Dean Kamath and his excellent faculty team, particularly Dr. Marylou Shockley, Chair and Dr. Murray Millson, MBA Program Director, for their hard work in implementing the MBA program and in preparing this Self-Study. I also thank them for their wonderful hospitality hosting me during my visit. Please feel free to contact me if anyone has any further questions regarding anything in this review. 7 P age