This month's interview: Susan Steer, MBA Manager & Laura Sachtler, Client Services Administrator

Each month the Distance Learning Campus Staff Newsletter provides a snapshot of the awesome work that University staff members provide from across the globe. It is an opportunity to learn more about the diversity of our distance staff work locations, pedagogical approaches and use of digital tools. Hopefully, we can provide you with inspiration about new ideas and ways of thinking about teaching in the distance environment.

This month we caught up with two fantastic people who work behind the scenes looking after the MBA. Meet Susan Steer, MBA Manager & Laura Sachtler, Client Services Administrator.

What is the best thing about being involved in Distance Education at the University of Otago?

"There are far less barriers with distance teaching and since we’ve offered an online programme we have the ability to teach the MBA further afield - we’re no longer restricted to those students who can come to Dunedin.

We now see people from all over the world in our programme. MBA students attend classes from Singapore, USA, Australia, Switzerland, South Africa, Hong Kong, Kuwait and China. The international context these students bring to the class discussions is really valuable.

The online MBA programme can also be delivered from anywhere in the world, and we have Lecturers who teach from overseas, such as Bangkok and Melbourne. Our lecturers can often continue to teach if they are required to go overseas on a business trip. The online nature of the programme means they can plan other commitments alongside their teaching."

Share something interesting or surprising about teaching by distance, and working with distance students.

"It’s inspiring how the students can fit their studies into their busy lives.

A typical MBA student who studies online, is a part-time student, attending two 3 hour classes a week, with group work and assignments. Students are normally in their late 30s – early 40s and are working full-time in middle to senior management positions. They often have young families, and have to make sacrifices in their personal lives in order to complete further study.

Their commitment and ambition to improve their knowledge is admirable, and so is the support the students will receive from their family and employers, who are key in helping them succeed.

This juggling of commitments by students has an impact on the way we do our work – we often have to support students and/or lecturers in the evenings and weekends, to accommodate the flexible nature of the programme."

Do you have some words of advice to anyone keen to take the plunge and explore Distance Teaching?

"Our advice would be to just take the plunge. Our very first lecturer on the programme, Julia Richardson, was very nervous and reluctant to teach online, and by the end of her first six weeks, her opinion of online teaching had completely changed from negative to positive. Since Julia started teaching in 2015, we have successfully taught over 170 online papers to 16 cohorts of students.

Our team in Executive Programmes puts a lot of time and effort into ongoing support for our lecturers. Each lecturer has a mentor, is part of a teaching and learning circle, and always has technical support for every lecture. As a team of two, we manage all the day to day administration so that lecturers focus only on their teaching and marking, everything else is taken care of. This takes a lot of time and we work on a very strict timetable of administrative support to ensure everything is in place for the start of each paper."

Provide us with one favourite technological tool/approach that has helped in engaging your students.

"We teach every class using Zoom, but the one difference between the Online MBA and some other distance programmes at Otago, is that every class is 100% live. We do not offer any pre-recorded videos, podcasts or other pre-prepared material. Each class is interactive with lots of student driven discussion.

Our lecturers have a number of ways of ensuring classes are interactive and student participation is high. These include break out rooms, polls, quizzes (e.g. using kahoot), student led presentations and using document cameras to draw technical diagrams. One lecturer has even included his own version of the game show Celebrity Squares, to wrap up the end of his paper.

The Online MBA has a current QS ranking of 10th best in the world, and the programme rated particularly well in the class experience section of the rankings. Much of the work that we as administrators are involved in, is to continuously improve the programme through student feedback, evaluation, and adapting processes that will result in a better customer service experience for the students."

Thanks for your time Susan and Laura! 😀🤣

If you would like to share your insights into Distance Teaching in one of our future Newsletters please don't hesitate to contact the Distance Learning Office.