The Ohio University College of Business has been using problem-based learning approaches to instruction for the last 13 years. In March of 1997, the MBA Without Boundaries program was launched as a distance offering using a project-based action learning format. Participants progress through the program as a cohort and work on nine projects over the course of two years. Participants come to campus for 4 to 8 days between projects for debriefing on the project just completed and to be introduced to the next project.

Participants work in teams of four or five using Lotus Domino as the conferencing system for conducting their work. Faculty members monitor the participant work and offer two types of commentary. First, there are infrequent coaching comments offered if a team is seen to be particularly bogged down -- coaching focuses on the problem-solving tactics and group processes being employed. Second, faculty members offer project reviews offered to the entire class. This is a "how is the class doing" perspective -- commenting on similarities and differences in both strategies and the products that are being produced.

In this presentation we will present an overview of the program and then focus on two issues: 1) instructor coaching and feedback and 2) participant interaction using Domino. Goals, alternative strategies, and problems in providing feedback will be discussed, with particular attention to the difficulty of balancing the felt need to "teach" the participants when they encounter difficulties with the goal of maintaining learner ownership. Participant conferencing strategies and the protocols they develop will be discussed. Both samples of their conferencing and data from interviews with the participants will be presented. For both participant conferencing and faculty coaching we will pay particular attention to how the strategies evolve across projects.

The Ohio University College of Business has been using problem-based learning approaches to instruction for the last 13 years. For more detailed descriptions of the evolution of the program development see Milter & Stinson, 1995 and Stinson & Milter, 1996. In March of 1997, the MBA Without Boundaries program was launched as a distance offering using a project-based action learning format. This followed over a year of development work between the core design faculty team and an external review board comprised of key individuals from corporations and learning centers. Selected participants must have at least 2-4 years of increasingly responsible positions and must be sponsored by their company. The actual average experience level in the first class begun in March 1997 is about 6 years. The average experience level for the second class begun in February 1998 is about 8 years.

The MBA Without Boundaries program uses an action-learning format with a theoretical base in cognitive constructivism, which places the learner into exactly the type of projects and work situations that he/she will face as a leader of the knowledge-age organizations of the 21st century. Participants learn basic business concepts in the context of their use, maximizing their ability to both recall and apply those concepts as they move back into the work world. Participants also develop the skills (communication, collaboration, teamwork) and the personal characteristics (initiative, creativity, personal responsibility) that are becoming so necessary for success. Participants develop a high level of comfort with information technology as they regularly access information through the resources of the internet, collaborate electronically over time and space, and develop and make professional-level computer-driven presentations.

The program targets 9 major projects. The projects tend to be large macro problems that address business holistically. Within each project are multiple smaller problems that participants must address to manage the total learning problem. Participants construct their knowledge of business practices by working their way through the problems. Participant learning is aided by the ability to access appropriate content on a just-in-time basis. Participants learn content at a time when it will be most useful to them in their management of the learning problems. While some of the problems are designed to challenge individuals separately, most of them are designed to be approached by collaborative learning groups.

While focusing on more macro problems and working with larger groups, the action-learning process employed is a derivative of Reiterative Problem-Based Learning, which was developed by Howard Barrows (Barrows, 1985), and follows closely the concepts of cognitive constructivism (Savery and Duffy, 1994) and cognitive apprenticeship (Collins et. al., 1990). (For a more complete description of our use of the action learning process, see Stinson, 1990, and Milter and Stinson, 1995.)

The program begins with an intensive one-week residency (Sunday 1pm through Sunday Noon). The participants then return to their homes and work assignments not to see each other again for 3 months. After 3 months of online interaction and collaboration, program participants meet for an intensive weekend (Thursday 1pm through Sunday Noon). Each project begins and ends in a residency. Participants progress through the program as a cohort and work on nine projects over the course of two years. Participants come together every three months during the two-year program; three extended weekends and one full week each year.

The faculty team, in regular consultation with the external review board, designs seven of the nine projects. Two of the projects are individual projects where participants design and implement projects of personal interest (these projects often benefit their company). Each project is developed to meet specific learning outcomes. In order to provide a foundation for the total program design, meta outcomes are developed by faculty members in discussion with executives and futurists. Content-to-action outcomes are more specific learning goals that participants need to learn in order to fulfill project expectations. The meta outcomes and content-to-action outcomes for the MBA program are as follows:

Content-to-Action Outcomes (Approached through multiple projects) Analyze an industry and develop a reasonable foresight for the industry. Collect competitive intelligence, analyze emergent strategy, and determine competencies, strengths and weaknesses. Analyze a company, identify important competencies and propose what the company should do now to compete effectively in the future. Identify a market (customer value added) for a new technological development Develop a proposal to a venture capitalist to obtain capital for a new venture. Develop a business plan to effectively implement a new venture. Select, from among alternatives, the most promising of new ventures. Develop a program to develop and bring a new product or service to market. Identify an appropriate manufacturing system and prepare a macro design of the system. Analyze a process and propose a redesign that minimizes waste and maximizes quality. Select from among alternatives, the most appropriate operational improvement techniques or programs, and design the implementation strategy. Develop global sourcing strategies and programs. Define a market, identify demand determinants for a product or service, and estimate demand. Determine and appropriate price for a product or service. Develop and implement a promotion strategy and program for a product or service. Create, interpret, and use financial statements Analyze cost structure and determine cost of products and services, using different cost accounting approaches (full, marginal, ABC). Using ratio analysis and other appropriate techniques, determine the financial strength of a company. Determine capital needed to support business activities and determine how to best obtain that capital. Demonstrate sensitivity to the disparate cultures, values, and behaviors of non US business Perform country analysis, determine potential for products and services in non-US countries, and identify appropriate modes of entry. Operate effectively within the complexity of global, simultaneous domestic and international, business operations. Identify and consider significant foreign trade issues, including laws, regulations, and currency exchange. Perform basic business research, primary and secondary, using appropriate resources. Incorporate ethical and social issues in process of making business decisions.

Each project has a set of "content-to-action" learning outcomes that are specifically linked to actions required during the projects. These outcomes are shared with participants and jointly agreed upon at the outset of each project during the reiteration on the first day. For the two individual projects participants develop a set of personal learning outcomes they wish to target.

During the 3-month span between the residencies participants, faculty, and outside resources collaborate online. Lotus Notes Domino is the software used to provide a platform for teams to work together and faculty to interact with the teams, individuals, and other faculty. Most faculty members initially believe it takes a lot of time to do it well. In actuality only 30 minutes per day checking on the database is usually sufficient to read entries for a class of 25 participants. It may take a bit longer to respond to many entries. Faculty members find that they must keep up or the entries can pile up.

Like other forms of groupware, Lotus Domino offers key enablers to assist with the collaborative work of learning. The elements of groupware as described by Lotus (1995) suggests that it must combine three essential elements to be viable:

• A reliable, scaleable and secure distributed document database. The database-centric model gives users the ability to assemble, share, and manage the rich variety of documents vital to conducting business --business plans, contracts, orders, product information, calendars and to-do lists, multimedia presentations, faxes, scanned images and video clips.
• An integrated messaging system. Groupware users must be able to take advantage of a messaging infrastructure to send and receive electronic mail and move documents through a workflow process.
• A rich application development environment. Developers must be able to rapidly build portable and scaleable strategic applications which span document-oriented and structured database information.

Although most of the previous use of Domino has made use of its ability to serve as a document database, the integrated messaging system and application potential is being presently evaluated for future use. The present configuration of Domino for the MBA Without Boundaries program contains two major sections: common and project-specific databases.

Common databases are available on the Domino Intranet Homepage include:

• announcements (information about the program in general),
• address book (with pictures and information on participants and faculty),
• general discussion (about non-project matters or tangential issues),
• learning resources (collection of selected best of the breed for knowledge enhancement),
• technology issues (trouble-shooting area and FAQ items),
• internet resources (online knowledge adding items and skills enhancement areas),
• faculty/staff discussion (private area for faculty to work together in development and evaluation).

Project databases on the Domino Intranet Homepage include:

• project discussion (specific discussion regarding the current project),
• learning activities (learning issues and questions of the week assignments for individual assessment),
• database for each team (collaboration on the current project).

The Intranet Homepage also contains links to a help document, chatrooms, earlier project databases, and the College and University Homepages.

During some projects a database for "Question of the Week" is used. In this database each week a faculty member poses a relevant question for participants to respond to during a two-week period. Responses are evaluated on the basis of their ability to move the discussion forward by adding new insights or appropriate synthesis reflections. Participant evaluation for each project is split between 40-60% on team deliverables and individual performance. The individual performance is comprised of performance on learning outcomes, reports, questions of the week, and post-project assessments.

Part of coaching is the ability to offer new information as needed by individual learners. During the 3-month distance period of each project, faculty members provide learning module material via "streaming video" by placing 5-10 minute clips onto the Domino database. Participants use RealPlayer to play the video, audio, and/or the PowerPoint slideshow to view these "video connect" segments. This allows individuals with various learning styles to stay in their strong suit as they digest new information. Participants can question any module material online in the project discussion database. They can view the video connect as often as they wish merely by clicking on the icon for the clip.

Another element of coaching is the provision of feedback about the process or the content being dealt with by the learners. Faculty members react to the entries made by participants in the various individual and team databases and deliver feedback on a continuous basis. Each project has a faculty member serving as the project director. The project director is responsible for tracking individual entries required in the learning issues and "question of the week" databases. Each team is assigned a faculty mentor who is responsible for tracking the team's deliverables during the project. These activities also occur via the Domino databases.

Another area for coaching is in the learning issues database. As learning issues are defined, they are stated as questions. As participants find information and draw conclusions related to the learning issues they make entries in the database. These are reviewed and all participants and faculty members can express comments. These entries are one source of evaluation of participant learning.

Participants use the various databases to submit information, ask questions of faculty and outside resources, discuss issues with colleagues and faculty, socialize, and collaborate in their project teams. After a couple of days most individuals become adjusted to using the asynchronous mode of interaction provided by the Domino database for these activities. There are, of course, times when synchronous discussion is preferred. When the team members need to reach consensus about a future direction or the value of a specific timely piece of information, it is advantageous to meet together at the same time. The database contains links to a chatroom (Microsoft's NetMeeting) that allows a team to hold a synchronous session. The chat software records these sessions and the chat log is placed in the team's database for tracking and archival purposes.

The Domino database allows participants to move quickly through various discussion, teamwork, data sources, chat, and other areas of collaboration. It allows participants to sort by topic, date, person, or category. It also allows for searching by key words. Because it is on the web, URLs that are entered immediately become hotlinks to the source sites. This makes it convenient for sharing detailed information on an "as needed" basis. The ability to function on an "as needed" basis is pervasive in the learning approach used by the MBA Without Boundaries program. The use of this web technology enhances the ability to deliver learning modules, information, tutoring, coaching, instruction, and collaborative space when they become needed by the learner. Recognizing the differences in learning and living needs among a group of learners, it would be difficult to offer such a program without the support of a software tool like Lotus Domino.

We began working with this innovative and evolving platform for learning 12 years ago. At that time we made the commitment that if we ever thought we had it right it would be time to get out of the business. We do not believe we have it right. We have never offered the same program two years in a row. At each residency we hold a feedback session with the participants with the goal being to improve the program. We keep an open discussion in our databases for the same purpose. We are constantly searching for better ways to assist learning.

It is not easy to find faculty members willing to step out on such an ambiguous and often tenuous platform. When we do find them we cherish their involvement as much as they fully cherish the experience. Participants in the program, including faculty members, gain first-hand experience in what it takes to develop a true learning community.