How To Acquire An MBA Online Degree

Universitas 21 is setting up a multimillion-dollar joint venture company with Thomson Learning and plans to establish an e-university offering MBA Online Degrees within a year.

The e-university would offer taught postgraduate courses - such as an MBA Online Degrees in e-commerce and a diploma in information management - alongside lower-level units that students could accumulate to gain a degree.

Universitas 21 - a British company formed by 18 universities worldwide - has been seeking to establish a totally online venture. Thomson is an international publisher that from 1967 to 1981, owned Times newspapers. Its Thomson Learning subsidiary runs assessment centres and offers students help in preparing for tests.

Alan Gilbert, U21 chairman and vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, said: "U21 brings brand, quality assurance and accreditation. Thomson Learning brings a unique capacity in assessment and capacity to solve problems in admissions. Thomson Learning is also a major supplier of high-quality content."

If the boards of U21 universities and Thomson Learning approve the business plan, the company will be established in early 2001 and enrol its first group of 1,000 postgraduates later that year. The joint venture follows the collapse of a deal between U21 and Worldwide Learning, a subsidiary of News Corporation's TSL Education, which publishes The THES.

The cooperation between the universities marks the beginning of a process through which the firm will integrate the valuable management information it provides with the portal site to present such information for human resources. A hub of management technology Manager's Business Zone is a systematic Web site in the cyber space which has been designed to gather persistent and the fastest information. And it is a hub of management technology to provide tools for reasonable analysis and precise prognosis.

To become a specialized portal site for the fields of management and economy, it provides people with essential and practical business information. The site is geared toward serving as a venue where everybody can interact with each other. Through sharing and recreating business information with others, business people will be able to maximize the value of their information.

By providing students with multiple avenues to access course materials and to participate in class discussion, the School offers an online MBA designed to meet the needs of executives in today's business environment.

The school was ranked 21st in America by Business Week magazine in 2003. The University said the Direct Online MBA Program, which started last year, is the first MBA degree available online from a nationally-ranked business school.

MBA Online