• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, September 16, 2011

The London School of Business and Finance (not to be confused with the London Business School, whose full-time and Executive MBA programs rank among the world's best, at least according to the Financial Times and BusinessWeek) apparently is offering the world's first MBA to be delivered through a Facebook application. Instead of nodding off in lecture halls, students can enjoy: high-definition video lectures covering the full program syllabus; lecture and revision notes; tutor and student support via relevant forums and discussion groups; Global Live Revision Sessions -- monthly online Q&A classes with their tutor and classmates; self-study questions and directed online reading. 

Taking college courses over the Internet is nothing new -- but an advanced degree?

One wonders if in the interest of full disclosure, grads will put MBA(fb) on their resumes, or pretend they slugged it out on campus in auditoriums, library stacks and study groups with contemporaries who chose to learn the "old-fashioned way"? 

On campus, studies are something of an endurance contest, with students expected to discriminate the wheat from the chaff in course materials and discipline themselves to study when a beer-pong tournament has broken out two doors down the hall. Since most of what is allegedly learned is forgotten shortly after final exams, graduates are rewarded for having survived the ordeal of business school and the way it has taught them to approach problems that will arise in their coming (or continued) careers. I suspect a good deal of this is lost with online learning.

I suppose a good analogy would be if you'd rather hire a vet who commanded troops and fought in actual battles -- or one who shuffled papers and spent the war(s) with hardly a hair mussed? 

You might also question the mental capacity of someone who spends so much time on Facebook, who thinks it's perfectly natural to go ahead and grab an MBA in between poking their friends, posting pictures that most of the rest of the world couldn't care less about -- and wondering who the hell these people are who want to be their "friend."

Besides, haven't all the cool kids left Facebook for Google+ and other social networks where they won't bump into their parents (or grandparents) or get notes from someone they haven't talked to for 15 years (for a reason)? I suppose it could become a more highbrow blow-off to tell someone that you are "busy studying feasibility analysis," and so can't catch them up on the past decade and a half of your life. Somehow sounds better than the more honest "watching really great porn at the moment."

Finally, what is to keep online learners from cheating their asses off (not that their on-campus counterparts haven't figured out some pretty ingenious ways to illicitly get As)?  How embarrassing during a job interview to say that your MBA(fb) grade point average was 2.5? And when you say you got a perfect 4.0 in an online course of studies, won't your prospective boss just assume you cheated your ass off? I would.

One wonders if universities are going the route of newspapers -- sowing the seeds of their own demise with online offerings. 

Don't ask me, I don't have an MBA.