Hi again!
well, well, let’s talk about how it is to start to work on-line…, the first presential period is oooover!!
it’s been so nice to be in Madrid, meet all these new interesting people, we work hard but we had a lot of very funny moments, I really like all of them, and we really enjoy being just students for 2 weeks, well…, now it’s time to back home…
In my case, I left Madrid one Tuesday morning, exactly the day we were starting with the discussions on-line, ummmm, how will be to work on-line?
I took my flight in the morning, after checking the discussion board (DB),….ummmmm, nothing there yet…., approximately 1 day later (subway-plane-cumstoms aggggg-plane-train-home!) I was again in front of a computer ready to connect with the DB, ummmmm, let’s see, let’s see what’s going on!!…., and….., my pupils get dilated, I stop breathing, my heartbeat is going crazy…. am I going to have an stroke? …200 posts! 200… posts?!! in one day? but… but we are just 11 people in the course this year… and I didn’t post anything yet…, 200? seriously?!! This must be a joke!!… well, you can imagine that whatever nice feelings I had for my classmates at that point completely disappeared…
first thing to learn from this experience, don’t think that you will feel that you will be working just by yourself, you will weak up and you will go to bed reading your classmates and professors posts, you will eat in front of your computer and you will use every minute you can to check what’s going on in the DB…, you may not have all your classmates in the room with you, but you pretty much live with them every minute of the day…
after the initial shock, and believe that is really stressful at the beginning, little by little you learn to manage all this and actually, in my case if I open the DB during a weekend and I don’t see any new comment I feel weird, like if something is going wrong…, anyway, it doesn’t happen very often, and of course, never during the week
two moths have passed already, and we still keep a very high number of posts per week, some very serious, some very funny, some complaints, some to cheer you up,… every week a little bit of madness appears at some point to relieve stress and make things easier…, in this master you work a lot, you learn a lot, but you also laugh a lot, not a bad combination, not at all…
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Hello, today I want to comment about the time zone differences and how this affects…or not the scheduling of your agenda each week. As you already know, I live in Guatemala, which means that in my class I am the one that has the craziest hour to attend classes on Saturdays. Just for your information, I have to wake up at 3am every Saturday to be ready for class…….yes it sounds inhuman but the way I see it, there is always a price to pay for the things you want, in life there is no such thing as “a free meal”, so in this case I have to say, no pain no gain.
I have the personal belief that everything we do in life has to be done with energy, enthusiasm and dedication (added to passion and joy), so this is pretty much what drives me to wake up every Saturday at that crazy time. Yes, is not an easy task, but I guess the adrenaline that your body pumps once you realize that you have a great class coming, plus a presentation to give to your fellow class, plus some fun interaction with your colleagues all around the globe in real time, makes the waking up more bearable, additional to this, a strong cup of coffee aids in the process.
The fun part is that sometimes in my case I simply don’t sleep from Friday til the class at 3am…..and not because I went out to a party and just arrived on time for the class, no! 
well maybe sometimes, but that’s more the exception rather than the rule, most of the times I didn’t sleep because I was studying or working on those presentations or reports due Saturday before the class. This is part of the fun, I don’t complain nor regret it because its all part of the learning (and also because I’ll sleep all day once the class is over). For me, 3am is equivalent to 11am Madrid Time, therefore classes finish around 7am which is equivalent to 2-3pm Madrid Time (sometimes it takes a bit longer because we have group meetings to split the tasks during the weekend for the reports due Monday 
, it sounds fun, isn’t it?)
Not everything is a “con”, living at this side of world is like living in the past, why? well let me explain a theory of relativity that I developed in this program. Since we use Madrid Time as reference for everything we do, meetings, report deadlines, classes, quizzes, etc, then for the duration of the program Madrid Time will be “the present”, people who live farther to the east therefore having their time zome ahead of Madrid Time, they live in “the future” and people like me who live farther to the west therefore having their time zone behind Madrid Time, we live in “the past” 
. This gives us an advantage when delivering cases and presentations, because we have more time so to speak to prepare for them, since we are “lagging behind” we can take advantage of our nights to finish them, i.e. on Fridays when we can finish the presentations while our colleagues at the other side of the pond are sleeping (of course, here is were the cycle closes regarding our lack of sleep during Saturday early-crazy mornings)….but well this is another chapter of the fun story named Global MBA at IE…..
later gator
Juan
Hello everyone,
As my colleague Julian already mentioned, we are just about to finish our first online period in the IXMBA. So I would like to make a few comments and reflexions about the online classroom, as it constitutes the main part of the program. For the 7 main courses we had during the past 6 months, there were 55 online sessions in total. Every student is supposed to make between 3 and 5 postings a week, answering questions from the professor and commenting answers from his fellow students.
I just finished counting, this made us to read 9871 !!! postings in total for the first part. May sound crazy, yes, sometimes it is, but most of the time it is great fun and you learn a lot from your colleagues.
Did I read all of them? Of course yes … let’s be honest … no surely I missed a few. Sometimes you keep a few messages to read on the weekend, well wishful thinking, you are already engaged in the homework for the next session and you are no longer able to consider them.
What is important about class discussion from my experience? Never start late, if you enter the blackboard only on Thursday, (online sessions generally are open between Tuesday and Friday), you are lost. You have to catch up reading a few hundred postings and unless you don’t show up at work that day, that’s not possible. I did it a few times, and believe me, you have a nicer sleep during the whole week when you start making a few postings on the first day.
We were told to respect a 5 lines limit for each posting, this is quite important, remember 9871 contributions to read and in some cases to comment, nobody wants to read half a page. Pictures and cartoons are great (thanks Jorge!), small fonts or large fonts are not very sexy as you get even more tired reading the postings, so after some months you make the decision to not read them at all.
What is amazing about the virtual classroom is that while reading the postings you imagine the professor and the students. As we saw each other during 2 weeks in Madrid, we know what we look like and how we speak, so you have that picture in your mind while following the class discussions.
The most important thing about a virtual class is the feedback. It is really essential to take reference to your colleagues in your postings, they will appreciate. Imagine a real class room, you make a comment, the professor looks at you, turns around, doesn’t say anything and moves forward, no reaction either from the other students, well I would feel awkward. The same applies to the virtual world; it is very stimulating and motivating to get feedback. This is also an advice I would give to the professors (if I may ;-)), the IXMBA is a tough and long road, a bit like a marathon in the Alps, and getting at various times some appropriate feedback, is a bit like passing a cheering point in a marathon, it gives you this little, yet so important energy push.
So, that’s all for now out of the virtual world, my next post will be about the real Shanghai in a few weeks.
Patrick
Hello people, its me again, Juan
As I promised in my previous post, I will talk a little bit about how the methodology works, and in this post I will focus on how the interaction is with your classmates. The first thing you have to consider is that you will be organized in groups (A, B, C and D which can vary depending on the number of students in each class). Each group consists of 5-7 members, and you will be working with them for several months. After that you will be shuffled again and groups are reorganized, this way you will have the opportunity to work and interact on a daily basis with everyone in the class, this will help you to improve your skills to relate with different people, with different cultures and the most important, with different personalities. This is an excellent training to learn how to deal with people with different ways of thinking, personalities, characters, etc, as its the case in real life.
I remember when I started the program I had the chance to work with three excellent persons, Lena, Hiro and Borja. The interaction is constant, you have to use all the resources available, MSN, Skype, email and the virtual campus (which has the platform to interact live with camera and audio in real time, with some awesome tools like whiteboards, chats, polls and a section to share documents so everyone could see them at the same time, trust me is hard to give the details written, but once you get used to it, is like being in the same room working with your colleagues.
The routine is the same, we worked on cases, starting with a first draft and building over it until we came up with the final report that was due Saturday or Monday. The interaction is daily, we used to schedule meetings every other day to discuss our thoughts on how to approach the case, for instance, when we were taking the Marketing course we used to spend all Sundays working on the reports. The course was excellent which implied that the reports the professor expected had to be high quality. We used to eat together while working, we also used to joke a lot and laugh like crazy while working, these made the whole experience very rewarding. The most amazing thing was that we were all in different locations: Guatemala, Germany, UK and Madrid! and it was fun to see our everyday activities merge with our MBA-work: Hiro going downstairs to put the laundry, or me calling McDonald’s to order my lunch (yes in Guatemala McD has home delivery), Lena being called by her husband that her dinner was ready, or Borja saving his dog from choking with a tangerine! hahahaha it was so fun when he told us that while we were working , of course he saved his dog, otherwise it wouldn’t be fun at all .
At the end it was like working in the same physical space, it only took dedication, responsibility and discipline from the members to be there making the time to work. At the end, the result was rewarding, the final report deserved a 10/10. Just FYI, this was every Sunday, while the Marketing course lasted, almost three months!
I have to go now, talk to you guys later….
bye
Juan
I cannot believe that the first online period is over, it has been since November and it feels like yesterday … In a week we will be travelling to Shanghai for our second face to face period, and I can’t wait (not for the exams for sure!) but to see all these lovely people I met in Madrid!
Life online had its ups and downs, but has been intersting in general (remember my blog “adicted to the blackboard!”). Now I have many unread posts, many flagged posts to read later, many summaries to download, etc. But what happens online stays online
I would like to share the diversity of our class here and include some pictures from Madrid in November, I will post others once we are back from China ,,, (Thank you Tsog, Maxim, Justine, Jeremy, Hasan and the photographer for the pictures) >>
Group Picture from the photographer
Treasure Hunt in Madrid! “Finding Hassan”
Mission accomplished!
Peace …
GAMA: “Thats the Library”
I have many other nice pictures, but I think that the last picture is a sign from Gama to go back to the IXMBA !
See you all in Shanghai ,,,
Julian
Hello, I’m Juan from Guatemala, and I’m a student in the GMBA English program. After some months in the program I realized one thing, I was NOT in a part-time program, I was completely submerged in a full-time program…what?! yes, when students evaluate the options they have available to get an MBA, one of the trade-offs they have to make is to ask themselves if they want to:
- quit/pause their jobs/businesses/careers in order to pursue a full-time program or
- if they don’t want to make this “pause” in their professional lives consider a part-time option.
As some colleagues have stated in this blog, people think of an online program as “easy”….well if people think that is because they haven’t been in a Masters degree at IE .
As the first weeks passed by, I realized that I wasn’t in a part-time program, the term fits just because you work all day, but when you leave the office, the real work has just begun. What do I mean with this, well, one thing you have to consider is that your social life will vanish, you will have to dedicate a lot of time (more than you can imagine) to the program, and as I say to my friends/family when they ask me to go out with them or to spend time with them: I am physically here in GT, but you have to think of me as if I were full-time living in Madrid….
A full-time program has one feature that compared to an online format, is a weakness (no offense full-time takers :-p):
- Full-time students spend half the day working in the courses, attending classes and having group meetings to prepare the reports/presentations, etc for the classes, but they also spend the other half of the day “hanging around”. This is not bad, but I suppose this depends on each person. If you are in the early stages of your professional life, with no kids, no spouse, no major responsibilities, then I think the full-time program is a great option as you will have time to party, study, learn and have the best time of your life.
- Full-time students are “isolated” from their real lives back home, meaning that they are all in the same conditions, everybody lives in Madrid, nobody is working, nobody is living their “normal” lives with all the implications, no routinary hassles, no daily errands, nothing, you are all centered and focused on the Master, so this constrains a lot the learning and interaction in a more pragmatic and every-day level, I will go over this idea in the next paragraph (I promise, I am about to finish this post ).
The Online format allows you to:
- learn and receive a training so intense that it will resemble what real life will be. You will have to deal with your everyday issues (family, work, social, emotional, etc) all in one package, just as real life is. Since all the students in these programs are living their lives simultaneaously with the program, you will learn so many things from your colleagues’ lives (family-related, job-related, emotional-related, culturaly-related, etc) that the learning process will extend beyond the boundaries of the Harvard/IE cases, books and the lectures from your professors….., trust me, you will learn more from your colleagues (who in the end will become very close friends…you’ll see why) than from the books. The experience is so nurturing, that a day will not pass by without you learning something new. The amount of things you learn from your classmate’s cultures is so amazing that is like living in each and every country they represent without being physically there.
- Since an MBA is all about learning how to optimize, how to increase productivity, how to be able to orchestrate many things at the same time, with excellence, a person who is interested in an online program (due to some personal constrains that block him/her from a full-time program in Madrid) is certainly someone who has no time to spare, and who wants to test his/her capabilities to the limits, who doesn’t want to lose the opportunity cost of relinquishing an income for a year or two just to pursue an MBA (once you get to Cost Accounting/Financial Management you will see this concept in detail ), then the online format is the perfect solution to get the most of your time.
As I said before, you will have to take yourself to the limits because it’s not an easy task. You will have to work a lot, you will have to be a disciplined person, but the experience will start paying off right away, because due to the fact that you are working, you can implement the new tools into your business/jobs and since you are doing this in “real time” you get instant feedback from professors and colleagues once you implement it. I will go over this in more detail later on, in future postings….
Now, I think I already made my point clear, an online program is a full-time program, because you will be able to do just two things:
- Your job/business
- The GMBA
The program is demanding, you have a huge load to carry on, but don’t panic, all these is worth every penny you spend, all these is worth every drop of blood you will leave on the road :-p, all these is worth every drop of sweat you will leave on the track, trust me, the experience is so rewarding that if I had to do it again, I will do it without hesitating.
I will continue sharing with you my thoughts about this experience in the coming days…
take care
Juan
I heard about the Master in Biotechnology Management at IE during an MBA fair, ummmm, interesting: an on-line program that last 13 months.
I started to take into account different things: on one hand, it is just one year, it allows me to work at the same time that I am improving my education, plus it is focused in the field that I want to work, so it’s perfect! On the other hand, (things are never black or white, of course) it is an on-line program …, am I really going to learn something? Will it be worthy? One year just me and my laptop …, what about the interaction with teachers and students? What about the network that we are supposed to create?, etc…, well, I am pretty sure you get the idea …, I was having mixed feelings.
Well, the program starts in Madrid where it is hold the first of three presencial periods that form the course. You will be there for 2 weeks that are supposed to help you to meet your classmates and teachers and to create some kind of bonds that will make easier to work in groups when everybody goes back to home. Well, me personal experience during those 2 weeks went through this:
1st day: we have the introductions, everybody seem to be “normal” people… let’s see how it goes…
1st night: beer after class and we go from talking about the master, the different subjects that we have to study for… (“boring” stuff)… to: age, number of children, boyfriends/girlfriends, etc
1st week: I have spend ~14h/day with the rest of students, at this point most of us already have a nickname, I have laugh in these 7 days more than in the previous 3 months… and I am a happy person who smiles a lot : ), so that is something…
1st and a half week: we start to think that is going to finish too soon…, at this point we know a lot about each other, we have heard a lot of stories about each other life … some of them you wish you wouldn’t have heard them … : ))
2nd week: time to say goodbye : ((, nobody wants to leave Madrid, do we really have to go back to our jobs? Uffff, nooooooo,
in short: it was great! we work 24/7, but we had a really great time and the interaction with the rest of the people was just unbelievable good…
next time I’ll talk a little bit about how was for me the start of the online period….
