Customer Value-Oriented Business Education in The Post-Covid Era: The Case of MBA Programs in Russia

Abstract

Purpose of the research: The Covid pandemic has been a time of enormous challenges in the management of education, business education included. Transformation in education technologies has been accompanied by changes in consumer values, which education management and marketing should now focus on. This paper investigates factors and parameters involved in formation of perceived customer value with regard to MBA programmes, using experience of e-learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods: To attain the stated goal, survey-based qualitative and quantitative two-stage research was carried out. This involved MBA students at leading Moscow universities who were studying online during the pandemic in 2020–2021 and for whom part-time learning suddenly turned into online learning for the whole period of study. Key results: The research tested the significance of a theoretical approach to educational values (seen as an array of functional, epistemic, social and emotional values), to be integrated into MBA programmes by educational management. The findings revealed the parameters which currently determine the content of each of these four groups of values in MBA programmes, indicating that the structure of programme choice has already been formed. During the pandemic, the most significant parameters of online education market development have been the reputation of the university, the reputation and e-content of the MBA programme, flexible organization of the study process (based on e-technologies) and the availability of an online educational platform. Quantitative analysis enabled the authors to form a mathematical model of integral consumer assessment of usefulness, taking into account the combination of education value factors and their significance for various sociodemographic groups. The findings proved our hypothesis about the significant dependence between sociodemographic characteristics of MBA students and what they value the most, which needs to be taken into account in knowledge management. This outcome can provide a compass for e-learning knowledge as it points to the most relevant direction: clusterization while positioning business education programmes, and implementation of flexible individual e-learning paths when planning educational content.