The College’s video production team orchestrates multiple classes each day to ensure that each class is delivered without a hitch, both for students watching live and for students who receive the recording later. They monitor each class as it’s being recorded, switching between cameras and moving each camera around to provide online students with a variety of angles of the classroom, offering a viewing experience similar to commercial television.

Once a class has concluded, the video team begins working on the video recording, editing out any technical difficulties and segmenting it into bite-sized chunks. Team members export the video and send it to the College’s instructional services team, who give the video a quality check and then upload it into Canvas, the student portal. The video is in students’ hands within 24 hours, but it’s often delivered much more quickly than that.

It can be a complicated task, but most students and faculty wouldn’t know it.

“It feels super seamless on my end,” said Kelly Martin, a professor in the marketing department who teaches in the Online MBA program. “We have a phenomenal technology team in the College of Business. When I walk in, everything is just so easy and ready to go. They’re fabulous to work with.”

Providing flexible options to meet students’ needs

The philosophy behind the Online MBA is to embrace flexibility and meet students where they are. The most popular choice for Online MBA students is the “on-demand” option that allows them to watch the class recording later, on their own time, Mader said.

“Being able to watch at their convenience definitely attracts really business-savvy people that are still working or raising families,” he said.

The program’s commitment to flexibility also means continuing to offer options that may be considered “older technology” — such as a static livestream when the high-tech Mosaic option is available — as long as there’s a demand for them.

About once a semester, the video team still gets a request to provide classes on a DVD or thumb drive, which they happily accommodate.

“We have service people that are deployed and they’re like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to get internet. Can I at least watch my courses on a thumb drive or something?’” Mader said.

In the decade that he’s been working at CSU, Mader has seen the technology behind the Online MBA program change dramatically — and it will certainly continue evolving in the years to come.

“With the internet came innovation, and we changed the DVD model from an opt-out program to an opt-in program to be a little bit more green,” he said. “We went from mailing out 500 DVDs a night to like 30 DVDs a night over the course of a few years, then that dwindled to one or two.”

Online students are ‘part of a community’

The program’s faculty make an effort to engage all of their students, regardless of how the students have chosen to take the course. For Martin, the marketing professor, that’s what makes teaching in the Online Master of Business Administration challenging — and fun.

“You are in the classroom interacting with around 30 students who are right there, physically present, and then you also have maybe a dozen to 20 students up there on the Mosaic wall, which, with that technology, really feels like they’re part of the class,” Martin said. “And I hope that they would say the same thing, because they are right there with us. We get to know those students just as well as we get to know the ones physically in class.”

She works hard to include the students who watch the class recordings, too.

“I always try to find different ways that they can engage, since they’re not part of the live discussion — ways that they can follow up with me or the other students and to really bring their voices into the class, too,” Martin said.

In their ongoing quest to make online courses more engaging, the video production team often highlights these student interactions in class.

That means the Evening MBA students who attend classes in person are an essential part of the Online MBA experience, too.

“I think we’re important, I think the faculty are wildly important, but I honestly think it’s the in-class students that are the most important ingredient in the stew that is our Online MBA,” Mader said.

Those students bring their own professional experiences to class, ask insightful questions and even challenge the faculty on occasion, all of which makes the class more interesting for their classmates participating remotely, he said.

“That’s the cool thing about our recording setup — you’re not just recording the faculty member,” Mader said. “You can also get the student interactions.”

Highlighting those student interactions helps make online students feel like they’re a part of the class, he said.

“It really helps it feel like you’re not just watching a PowerPoint slideshow at home and just cruising through your content — you’re part of a community,” Mader said. “I think that’s what a lot of this experience boils back down to, because all the studies show that we’ll ditch out on learning, as human beings, as quickly as we can, but if we feel like we’re part of a community, we’re going to keep coming back and learning with everybody.”

Business graduate students are grateful for that sense of community, Martin says.

“The difference between our program and most other MBAs is that students who watch our lecture capture are really, to the best extent possible, part of the class,” she said. “They’re watching a class that was live, and they’re seeing the discussion and engagement all as part of their learning experience.”

Many online programs at other universities rely only on recycling pre-recorded, canned video or don’t use video at all, which doesn’t foster connections between students or with faculty.

“What’s really neat is that not only do students have this connection with me, because I’m providing the classroom engagement every week, but they really connect with each other,” Martin said.