Twenty-six employees from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport are set to receive master of business administration degrees from Bryant College next month, having nearly completed the school’s first "distance-learning" program.
Funded by a $1.5 million federal grant, the three-year pilot program, initiated in 1999, enables naval employees to weave coursework into their busy work and travel schedules. The program’s students, mainly engineers, technicians, scientists and managers, complete assignments electronically from their Newport campus or while traveling abroad – in some cases as far away as Europe and Australia.
"The distance-learning aspect offered a lot of flexibility," said Kelly Ross, a student in the Bryant program who manages 16 employees in a NUWC unit that tests and evaluates submarine sonar systems.
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Ross travels to Washington, D.C., three or four times a month for defense work, but said her coursework never skipped a beat. "You can log on from wherever you are, so you don’t have to worry about going away and missing class."
While students primarily complete assignments from Newport, many travel regularly like Ross. And a handful of students were called up to active duty after Sept. 11, but were able to complete their coursework using their government-issued laptop computers. One student remained in the program despite a six-month stay in Australia.
Each course includes three face-to-face meetings between students and faculty – typically in Newport – at the beginning, middle and end of each semester. All other coursework, including lectures, class discussion, group projects, tests and written case studies and reports, are administered over the Internet.
There are virtual classroom sessions, for instance, where students log on and listen to an audio feed of the instructor’s lecture, while following along on a Power Point presentation that serves as a digital blackboard. Students at any time can ask questions and participate in the class discussion via their audio feed.
And classroom sessions are recorded so students who might have been in meetings or on other naval assignments can make up the session later.
A similar online exchange is deployed for group projects when one or more team members are stationed elsewhere. Tests are taken online and papers are handed in by submitting them to a "digital drop box" on the Web site.
While the curriculum includes all the basics of an MBA program, it is tailored to meet the demands of Defense Department workers. One course, for example, covered the process the Pentagon uses to acquire weapons and systems. And a business-simulation project presented students with real-life budget scenarios of a Defense Department project.
Many students will complete their MBA without ever having set foot on Bryant’s campus, according to Kristopher Sullivan, director of graduate studies at Bryant College.
"We put a lot of effort into making sure (the distance-learning program) was the same quality for them as it is for an MBA coming to campus," Sullivan said.
Ross said she hopes her MBA degree will help her to move up to become a division head at NUWC, where she would manage as many as 100 employees and be in charge of several large defense projects.
The $1.5 million federal grant was a provision written into a 1998 defense authorization bill by the late Rhode Island Sen. John H. Chafee.
