Kelley School Forms UK Partnership with Joint MBA Offering

Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business has formed an alliance with Manchester Business School (MBS) to offer a joint MBA in the blended learning format that combines online and in-person instruction.

Blended learning program pools two reputable online providers

The Kelley/Manchester Global MBA will be taught largely online with a sprinkling of on-campus elements that will see students brought together for a period of four to six days each semester, and in different countries. It will be offered as a lockstep program across a guideline total of two years, but as the program will target working professionals, students will have the chance to delay their participation in any one of its four semesters, should they wish to, and to take it with a subsequent cohort instead.

It’s an interesting link-up as both the Kelley School and Manchester Business School already operate reputable online MBA programs. In fact, the two schools placed third and fourth in last year’s QS Distance Online MBA Rankings. In opting for this new joint offering, students would ultimately graduate with a degree from both institutions. Plus, the use of blended learning is something commonly found among the world’s best online MBA programs.

Fiona Devine, head of MBS – officially known as Alliance Manchester Business School since receiving a donation of more than US$20 million from Lord (David) Alliance – talked of strengthening the school’s global appeal in what is the latest in a line of international partnerships at MBS. Last September, Devine told the FT that the Kelley School’s particular appeal lay in its online expertise, as well as in the facilities it can offer students in Washington DC through its links to the Washington Campus consortium.

Program to draw on Alliance Manchester Business School’s international locations

The Kelley School’s main campus, however, is in Bloomington, Indiana, and this is where the inaugural cohort in the new blended learning program will kick off with the first of its residential components. Washington DC is to be used for the third semester’s residential component, but this is stated to be an optional rather than required part of the program. Two further campus components will see students travel to one of Manchester Business School’s international bases outside of the UK (in Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai or Sao Paulo) and at which students can already take a part-time MBA, or electives as part of the school’s full-time MBA based in Manchester.

From the Kelley School’s perspective, the program is seen as an opportunity to attract a more international student body:

“It is different for our faculty because we will teach to a much more diverse and integrative body of international students. It’s not just students going to global locations, it’s students working on multicultural global teams,” the Kelley School’s dean, Idalene Kesner, told Poets & Quants. In addition, MBS did score highest for international diversity in QS’s 2015 rankings, with a count of 106 enrolled nationalities.

The blended learning program is set to launch in July 2016 with the hope that roughly 40 students boasting an average of six or seven years’ prior work experience will enroll in the inaugural class. It comes with a price tag of US$65,000 attached, almost the exact same price as tuition (excluding living expenses) for the full-time MBS MBA this year and a little less than the total costs (including living expenses) associated with one year of the Kelley School’s full-time MBA (a two-year program), if you are not a resident of Indiana.