History of Online MBA Degrees
There are so many online MBA programs available today that we tend to think of them as having always existed, but this is not true. In fact there has been a gradual development towards today's online MBA degree, starting in the 1950s and 60s when people wished to go back to college after they had worked for a time, and found that they knew more about management skills than many of the lecturers, even though they were not well qualified. The idea of gaining credits for experience was born. In 1972, the first external degrees were awarded in the US , allowing examination of information not acquired in the classroom.
Distance learning programs began to proliferate, and as the idea of a graduate degree for working managers gained acceptance so the two began to appear attractive to industry. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it began to be apparent that this kind of education bore real fruit for ambitious intelligent managers, and the educational establishment started to deliver more flexible programs in different ways.
The advent of easily accessible Internet in the mid 1990s meant that distance learning became that much easier to both deliver and for students to use, and the online degree was born. These new forms of delivery could almost be custom made for a degree such as the MBA, and the number of degrees has proliferated during the last decade. This kind of program has been taken up by both industry and the universities as the way forward for the information economy.
