The significance of face-to-face instruction in hybrid executive education

Abstract

The 2009 global recession forced corporations world-wide to seriously explore the option of blended and online executive education in order to minimize the travel cost involved in bringing all the participants together in conventional face-to-face executive training settings. In this vein, some of them tried to completely do away with face-to-face instruction by replacing it with synchronous online lecturing tools in hybrid executive education programs. However, the end-results in terms of participant engagement and retention in many such instances were not encouraging, thus highlighting the significance of conventional face-to-face instruction in hybrid programs. This paper builds a case around how the inclusion of face-to-face instruction increases the success rate of executive education programs in terms of student retention proportional to its blending share by citing several on-ground comparable illustrations from a global executive education provider. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.