Tutoring executives online: what drives perceived quality?

ABSTRACT

Studies of learning and student satisfaction in the context of online university programmes have largely neglected programmes catering specifically to business executives. Such executives have typically been away from higher education for a number of years, and have collected substantial practical experience in the subject matters they are taught. Their expectations in terms of both content and delivery may therefore be different from non-executive students. We explore perceptions of the quality of tutoring in the context of an online executive MBA programme through participant interviews. We find that in addition to some of the tutor behaviours already discussed in the literature, executive students look specifically for practical industry knowledge and experience in tutors, when judging how effective a tutor is. This has implications for both the recruitment and training of online executive MBA tutors.

KEYWORDS:

• Distance learning
• service quality
• e-learning

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Middlesex University for supporting this research. In particular, we thank Simon Best for his support with data collection. We also thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments. An earlier draft was presented at the Academy of Management Conference, Anaheim California.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Stephane Bignoux http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3362-4576

Kristian J. Sund http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4193-223X