Online MBA Students Travel to Panama as Part of Class

February 2009

For a handful of UM professional master of business administration (PMBA) students, the winter break included a five–day trip to Panama which served as the site for the final step in the final class of their master’s degree.

Tony Ammeter, associate dean of the UM School of Business Admistration, traveled with four students to study the expansion of the Panama Canal as part of his online project analysis class. The current expansion of the canal calls for a series of new locks and approach channels to facilitate a growing number of ships–a major project that racks up a tab of more than $5 billion. The project is expects to be finished in 2014.

The four students who went on the trip completed different parts of their final project examining the expansion of the canal to determine if they thought the project was properly planned.

“It’s a very interesting project, and it is very important for North America” Ammeter said. “Whenever you can ship something by road, air or ship, the ship is always cheapest and uses less energy. (The canal) is going to be 50 percent deeper and 50 percent wider.”

The trip was a bit of an experiment for the online program, but both Ammeter and his students felt the trip was a nice capstone to the program and could be a good change for the current curriculum.

For Tami Busby, who runs her own human resources consulting firm in Tupelo, Miss., the greatest value of the trip came from actually seeing how the canal worked.

“You can see and study the canal in a book, but you don’t really realize how magnificent it is until you are there,” Busby said. “To see the size of the vessels going in and out and to watch the water level go up and down is awe–inspiring. You realize it is going to take hours instead of days for the ship to reach the other side and you realize how big a deal that is.”

The PMBA offers a flexible online cohort of coursework. Students take from one to three classes a semester and usually complete the program in between two to six years. The emphasis is on setting a pace that works for the individual student.

While the classroom may have been taken out of the mix, there is a classroom mentality among the students. It is not required, but the students who enroll in the cohort usually meet a couple times a semester and frequently communicate via phone and e–mail on projects–though the students may be in different states or countries at the time.

“In my two years in the program, I never had any trouble getting a hold of my professors,” Busby said. “I hadn’t taken statistics in ten years, but I called my professor, drove to Oxford, and we sat down and worked on it until I was caught up. I wouldn’t have been able to finish had it not been for that.”

To Professor Ammeter, who has taught both online and on campus MBA seminars, the classroom variable does not take away from the program–the endgame is the same as the full–time program.

“The PMBA is a lot more self–driven, of course,” he said. “But, I think there may be something to learn from the online classes–in industry this is how things happen. It’s not like you can always spend lots of time with one group and then more time with another, lots of things happen at once today.”

(Andrew Abernathy)