One factor that makes a world-class Executive MBA course so successful is its borderless classroom learning system. It is HKUST and Kellogg School of Management's intention for students to take Kellogg classes anywhere, regardless of whether their home campus is a Kellogg EMBA programme in Hong Kong, the Middle East, Europe, North America or Latin America. 'Over the past two years each of our EMBA programmes, including the Kellogg-HKUST Programme, has built a dedicated live-in opportunity open to students across the Kellogg network,' said Julie Cisek-Jones, assistant dean and director of the Kellogg School's EMBA programmes worldwide. She said although Kellogg faculty members, who taught in the EMBA programmes at HKUST and worldwide, were based in Evanston, Illinois, they travelled abroad, teaching at each of its campuses. 'Our partner institutions then provide their premier faculty. As a result, the students, who are senior executives, are joined in the classroom by the best faculty members that each school has to offer.' She said the students in the EMBA programmes travelled to their programme campus twice a month. So the study groups that were formed at each institution had an international flavour. 'You can see that in the Hong Kong programme, where students come from the south Asia and, because of the nature of business in Hong Kong, throughout the world.' The programme in Hong Kong requires that students take part in a seven-day live-in period at the HKUST campus at the start of the course in January. The second live-in exercise is in August when participants fly to Chicago for two weeks to interact with other Kellogg's partner schools' students from around the world. Ms Cisek-Jones said the EMBA programme stood out from the others because of its diversity. 'Every EMBA programme defines itself in some way. Some have chosen to cater to the finance sector, others focus on health care. But our objective is to bring together students from a wide variety of professional backgrounds for immersion in a programme in which they learn as much from each other as from the faculty. It requires an enormous amount of teamwork but, for those students who find value in that kind of an atmosphere, it just can't be beat.' In a bid to further fine-tune the curriculum, she said feedback from every faculty member in every course was solicited. Leadership and the globalisation of business were two areas in which students clearly wanted to delve more deeply, she added. Through the live-in weeks there has been a dramatic increase in opportunities for students to take course work on any of its campuses and build their global, professional networks. 'The Evanston campus used to be at the centre of it all, but in recent years what used to look like a wagon wheel now looks much more like a spider's web. We found ways to maximise each of the worldwide programme's individual strengths so that today the sum of their parts is much more than any of the individual pieces could be.' Ms Cisek-Jones stressed that HKUST and Kellogg School shared a common set of values. 'We put a high priority on listening and building a student-centric organisation. We share a commitment to academic rigour in the classroom and to making the classroom experience so up-to-the-minute that our students can immediately apply what they learn.' She said it was a testament to those who established the Kellogg-HKUST programme that they had the foresight to know that the Kellogg School needed to be a first mover in Asia, and then dedicated the time and resources needed to build the course. 'It has enabled us to be part of the stunning economic growth of the Asian region over the past 10 years.' One of the important ways the programme has improved is the vastly expanded global experience of its faculty members. Because of the way the programme is structured, faculty members do research, consult and teach in North America, Europe and Asia. They bring that enormous wealth of international experience to the classroom.
