Webinars

The Graduate Business Curriculum Roundtable organizes virtual educational presentations related to graduate business curricular and co-curricular topics.


Don't miss our upcoming webinars:



Innovator Award Winners Webinar featuring
Penn State Smeal College of Business



Thursday, March 21, 2024

1:00 p.m. EST/10:00 a.m. PAC
  

Join us to learn about the amazing innovations from our 2023 Innovator Award Finalists and Winners.  This webinar will feature the Penn State Smeal College of Business - Transforming the MBA with an Integrated Specialized Master's Portfolio.   

The two-year residential MBA market has been in decline for many years with scholarships increasing to attract qualified students for rankings purposes, causing many two-year MBA programs to run at a significant loss. In response to the ongoing transformation of business education and changing consumer preferences, the Penn State Smeal College of Business transformed its two-year residential MBA to a one-year, earlier career, MBA with a STEM designation. This strategy leverages the strength of the Smeal integrated professional graduate portfolio and enables students in the new one-year MBA to "stack" a second master's degree and earn two or three online graduate certificates with the courses that count in common between the two master's degrees. The results from our first one-year MBA class have greatly exceeded our expectations – we filled the program with 120 students and had a waiting list of prospective students.  This class consists of our highest percentage of women (about 50 percent) and is about half fifth-year students directly out of their undergraduate degree programs and about half with one to five years of work experience.  The class is approximately 50% international representing 15 countries and 16 states.  The average undergraduate GPA in the class is 3.5 with a wide variety of backgrounds, though many are from STEM and business-related fields.  About one-third of the first class of the one-year MBA plans to “stack” a second master’s degree, and we expect degree stacking with the one-year MBA to grow in the coming years. This class is our largest intake of MBA students in well over 20 years and is the first financially viable MBA class in at least 20 years.

 

Presenter: Brian H. Cameron, PhD, Associate Dean for Professional Graduate Programs and Executive Education, The Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University
Brian Cameron is the Associate Dean for Professional Graduate Programs and Executive Education in the Smeal College of Business at the Pennsylvania State University.   In his current role, Dr. Cameron led the rapid growth of the Smeal professional graduate portfolio from the four master’s programs and one online graduate certificate, representing approximately 300 students, in 2015 to an integrated portfolio of 17 masters programs, an Executive Doctor of Business Administration, and 15 online graduate certificates representing over 2,300 students.  Professional master’s programs include inter-college collaborations with several Penn State colleges and campuses.  Dr. Cameron is in the process of reorganizing and integrating the non-credit Penn State Executive Education unit with the Smeal professional graduate programs office and is currently leading a team researching innovative pedagogical approaches for online and hybrid graduate professional education and non-credit executive education.  Dr. Cameron was appointed to the Transforming Education Task Force for the Future of Online Learning and World Campus and was selected to attend the Big 10 Academic Alliance’s Academic Leadership Program in 2018.   His work has been the topic of several articles in BizEd, the publication of AACSB, the international business school accreditation body.  He is very active in the professional graduate education community and is a founding member of the Consortium for Online Graduate Business Education and serves on the boards of the MBA Roundtable, the Executive MBA Council, and the Business Architecture Guild.  Dr. Cameron is the recipient of the 2022 Penn State Commission for Adult Learners’ Shirley Hendrick Award for his contributions to significantly foster and increase Penn State’s efforts to serve the adult learner.

Moderator: Stephen Taylor, Managing Director, BusinessCAS, Liaison International











 



Innovator Award Sponsored by:



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Innovator Award Winners Webinar featuring
University of Iowa Tippie College of Business



Wednesday, April 24, 2024

1:00 p.m. EST/10:00 a.m. PAC
  

Join us to learn about the amazing innovations from our 2023 Innovator Award Finalists and Winners.  This webinar will feature the University of Iowa – Ready, Set, Lead, How the Iowa MBA prepares students to be Executive Ready.  

While preparing students to be the leaders of tomorrow is not unique for MBA programs, the Iowa MBA’s Executive Ready approach is. Here’s how:  The Iowa MBA now includes multiple robust capstone options that expand applied learning and communication skills are integrated throughout the capstones and poised to be added throughout the curriculum. Their capstone courses develop Executive Ready skills such as big picture thinking, strategy, decision making, thinking forward, negotiation, team management, change management, and communication regardless of which capstone option a student selects. The Executive Ready framework is two-fold: throughout the capstone courses, students are guided and supported to develop strategic recommendations that can be presented to an executive audience; the experience also arms students with skills needed to become the executives.

 

Presenter: Jennifer V. Blackhurst, Associate Dean
Tippie Graduate and Professional Programs,  University of Iowa
Professor of Business Analytics


In 2018, Jennifer Blackhurst was an early adopter of developing online courses working in collaboration with University of Iowa’s Distance and Online Education to develop one of nine core courses in the MBA program, Operations and Supply Chain.  In July 2020, Jennifer assumed the role of Associate Dean for Tippie Graduate and Professional Programs. In this role she oversees the graduate management program portfolio consisting of both full-time on-campus master’s degree programs and part-time off-campus MBA and Business Analytics programs along with a variety of certificates, and an MBA/MSBA dual degree program.


Presenter: Jill Tomkins, Assistant Dean, Tippie Graduate and Professional Programs, University of Iowa 
Jill Tomkins has been with the Tippie College of Business since 2012, where she has been instrumental in our growth and expansion of graduate and professional programming and manages a team focused on course planning, curricular changes, academic policies, registrar functions, advising and student experience. Prior to working in higher education, Jill was a Fulbright scholar in Malaysia and worked with a number of refugee agencies, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, throughout Africa and the Middle East. 




Moderator: Stephen Taylor, Managing Director, BusinessCAS, Liaison International











 



Innovator Award Sponsored by: