Editorial: Want an M.B.A.? Facebook has an app for it

Goldilocks had it easy. If you try comparing the pursuit of the “just right” amount of… Goldilocks had it easy. If you try comparing the pursuit of the “just right” amount of Internet that belongs in higher education with the pursuit of porridge at an optimal temperature, you might reach a similar conclusion.

As colleges and universities across the world accept online applications, roll out Web courses and embrace the Internet as an increasingly essential teaching tool, determining when, where and how much Internet is actually appropriate to inject into the student experience is currently without a clear solution.

If educators in general are stumped, however, that sure doesn’t mean certain institutions won’t hesitate to plant their boots in the sand.

The New York Times reports that late in October, the for-profit London School of Business and Finance launched the first-ever MBA program — and the first degree-awarding academic program, for that matter — to be delivered through a Facebook application. Through the application, interested students can access many courses that are normally part of the University of Wales-certified “Global MBA” degree, like corporate finance, ethics, accounting, etc. — without paying for them.

Tuition fees only apply if students decide to take the exams associated with each course, and instead of forcing students to sign on to the full cost of yearly tuition, each module is paid for separately. “Fewer than one in four students who begin an online MBA ever graduate, and it didn’t seem ethical to me to take someone’s money up front, knowing that most of them won’t finish,” Aaron Etingen, founder and chief executive of the London School of Business and Finance, told the Times.

Etingen is a businessman we like. Considering how for-profit schools have recently come under fire for marrying appallingly low graduation rates with unpayable student debt, it’s great Etingen doesn’t force people into a specific brand of online education that could fail them. Empowering prospective students by letting them literally shop around a digital marketplace of classes — through Facebook-mediated open courseware — before making decisions is a particularly ingenious idea.

But regardless of how much the Global MBA program improves upon the traditional for-profit model, we still hesitate. And it’s the online nature of the business degree that pulls us back. (Really, it’s not like there’s a USB-adaptable electronic hand you can practice shaking.)

Before more institutions embrace online education as the “wave of the future” it’s often described as, we think there are a few basic questions that must first be thoroughly researched and answered.

• For mastery of what kind of courses is face-to-face interaction essential?

• Do employers treat online degrees like traditional ones, and if not, how can we close the perception gap?

• What are the best ways to prevent cheating in online environments?

• What is the ideal role of the university in the Internet Age, and how can traditional institutions and online courseware — free or not — work together symbiotically?

• More broadly, how can we balance allowing Internet-mediated universal access to education with promoting quality and veracity in our information?