WGU MBA-HM first impressions and ongoing comments

[dmjacobsen]

So, I started the WGU MBA Healthcare Management on May 1st. Another member asked me if I would create a thread to document my progress so that other MBA-HM's could benefit. Initially, I didn't really think I would have time to do this. But, inspired by my completion of my second class today (fingers crossed -- assuming the last task will pass), I decided I would put together a thread and update it occassionally.

My background: Registered Nurse for the past 3 years in the ED. LPN in various healthcare settings for 4 years prior to that. Somewhere in the mix, I got my EMT license and have about 5 years of EMS experience. I'm currently in an MSN/FNP program full-time and will start my third semester in June. Yep, you read that right -- I'm going full-time to a Nurse Practitioner program *and* I'm going to attempt the MBA-HM full-time. Insane, I know, but I have a newborn and want to get all of this knocked out while she won't remember how much daddy was away.

My goal for the MBA: I eventually want to open my own practice after I get some experience as an NP. In the meantime, business education can't hurt. Most MD's and NP's don't have any business background, so it may help me stand out from the crowd and get my foot in the door.

For the purposes of an attempt at brevity, I will try not to repeat some of the information that rebel100 included in his own WGU MBA thread, such as information about how the assessments work, details about TaskStream, etc. For that info, go to his thread here: http://www.degreeforum.net/general-educa...eview.html

So, on to the meat about the WGU-HM program.

I used WGU for my undergrad, so I was already familiar with the way things worked -- competency-based education with an emphasis on writing, writing, writing and more writing. I didn't have to take WGU's "Education Without Boundaries" (sort of an orientation class), so I was able to jump right in. My courses were not actually available in TaskStream until May 3rd, but I was able to get a copy of the E-business task information from another student.

I started in with E-business. This is essentially a marketing course with a focus on -- you guessed it -- online marketing. Much of the course was related to website building, search engine optimization, securing vendors for various online marketing services, etc. I was already familiar with a lot of this information, as I did some web design in a former life. Although the tasks required a lot of detail, they were not particularly difficult, and I finished the course (3 competency units / credit equivalents) in about a week.

Next up was Accreditation Audit. This course covers the various aspects of ensuring your healthcare organization is prepared for inspection by various accreditation agencies. The scenarios in this class were chiefly hospital scenarios, whereby a hospital was preparing for inspection by Joint Commission. As I work in a hospital and have been through numerous Joint Commission inspections and mock inspections, I was very prepared for this. Again, the tasks were very detailed, but not difficult, thanks to my background. I finished the course (4 CU's) in about 6 days.

I'm taking a break and will start working on Human Resources tomorrow. I'm not very excited about tackling this, as HR is not my strong suit. Not to mention, I've never been particularly impressed by *any* HR rep I've ever met, so there's this association in my head with HR and being a mindless, incompetent moron. Apologies to any HR monkeys on this board. I'm going to try to trudge through this as quickly as possible, hopefully knocking it out before the end of the month. We'll see how it goes.

In my previous experience with WGU, I made the terrible mistake of obsessing over TaskStream (the website used to submit assignments and receive grades). In undergrad, assignments could take anywhere from 3 to 5 days to be graded, and if the assignment wasn't sufficient, it was returned to you for editing and resubmission. This caused a *serious* delay in my progress, as I would not work on a new assignment until the previous assignment passed.

Taking that into consideration, I'm approaching the MBA program with a "submit it and forget it" attitude. I'm submitting my assignments and immediately going to work on the next one. If a task is returned for revision, I'll revise it as quickly as possible and resubmit, returning back to whatever task I was working on before. Mind you, I put 100% effort into that very first submission, so there is some disappointment when a task is returned (so far, only once out of 7 tasks), but it's best just to push on and get it over with.

I should mention that I'm currently on FMLA, thanks to the newborn, so I've been putting a lot of hours into finishing some coursework before I have to return to work. I'm sure that my progress will slow down significantly next month, as I'll be back to work full-time and will be starting a pediatric rotation in my NP program.

Anyway, I'm happy to answer any questions. I will occassionally post updates in this thread as I complete courses or run into roadblocks. As I mentioned earlier, rebel100's thread is a great resource and was one of the reasons I decided to pull the trigger on the WGU MBA.

[rebel100]

Awesome! I'm very glad you are blogging on this, I look forward to your future posts!

[dmjacobsen]

Got my last task graded today for Accreditation Audit -- passed with no revisions for all four tasks in this class! That's 7 CU's down in about 2 1/2 weeks. Pretty crazy looking at the Program Progress on myWGU and realizing that I'm already 19% finished with the program in such a short amount of time. Again, though, these were topics that I was already familiar with, so it's no big surprise. I'm sure I'll hit a roadblock with courses like Financial Analysis and Decision Analysis. I took most of the day off today to spend time with my daughter and wife and just relax. However, I did get the skeleton of all three HR tasks ready for me to plug in information.

What I do for each task -- and what I found in undergrad that helped me keep on track and pass most papers without revisions -- is I put together a barebones document, already formatted for APA, with a paragraph and heading for each section of the rubric. Then, under each heading -- labeled with the individual name of the subtask -- I'll put in a filler paragraph with junk text, just to keep my formatting. Underneath that filler paragraph, I'll write my notes in red, along with whatever the highest-scoring criteria is for that particular section of the rubric. Then, as I'm writing my paper, section by section, I have my notes right there in the document so that I don't have to switch back and forth between several screens, and I have my criteria for success right in front of me.

I realize that what I just wrote probably makes no sense to anyone who isn't familiar with the WGU tasks and rubrics. But, hopefully it will make sense to those who are familiar with the WGU task process.

Just to illustrate, attached is an excerpt of my Task One paper. There isn't anything here that would violate academic honesty or any other WGU policy -- the headings are simply the rubric headers and the red text is the criteria from the rubric.

Now, on to tackle HR while I still have a few more days off work!

Edit: Not sure why the image I attached looks so tiny. I've uploaded it to imgur and hoping the link will work here.

[dposborne]

Congrats on starting. I started back in February. So far I knocked out E-Business, HR, Supply Chain, Financial Analysis, and I am half way through Decision Analysis. I decided along with my mentor to go for the longer more difficult classes first so that my second term should be pretty non eventful. I would really like to just concentrate on Leadership and the Capstone (the 2 team classes) second term and be done with it.

Some advice, don't stress over the papers. You can never get the time back you lose by trying to perfect them. Just be direct and to the point. In some cases you can pretty much bullet point your submissions. I have noticed that the Taskstream graders are pretty much just scanning the papers to make sure you include sufficient information to satisfy the task. They really aren't looking at grammar, punctuation or even proper sentence structure. Sad to say but that's what you get with contract graders I guess.

I have found that there are 2 ways to approach the WGU MBA. The "I want to learn and take the time to absorb the information" approach or the "I want a check in the box so I want to get it done as fast as possible" approach. The first approach you pretty much read the material take notes or use OneNote as one student suggested in the communities. The second approach you can pretty much google a lot of the information you need to satisfy the tasks (not actual papers, but topics in the tasks) and write your papers out accordingly. I personally am going with both approaches. On topics that I know a lot about already I use approach 2 and on topics I'm not strong on I use approach 1. Looking over the material though I can see how one can do this MBA in 3.5 months as one student posted about in the communities.

I know that the HM tract may be a little different than the standard MBA tract but some classes are the same, if you need any help please let me know.

[zenurez]

Thanks dposborne, i look forward to hearing updates from you as to if you're able to do this in two WGA terms.

[dposborne]

Thanks dposborne, i look forward to hearing updates from you as to if you're able to do this in two WGA terms.

I was thinking about starting my own thread on the MBA, but rebel pretty much covered everything there is to cover. I am here to answer questions and help anyone if they need it though.
About finishing in 2 terms, this is completely doable for a person experienced in distance learning. 1 term may be pushing it, but I can see how it's doable as well. I am really flabbergasted at how long they allow for some of these courses. In the beginning I was asking my mentor if I wasn't taking enough time on the material before I turned papers in. I wasted a lot of time trying to "perfect" my papers...

[dposborne]

What I do for each task -- and what I found in undergrad that helped me keep on track and pass most papers without revisions -- is I put together a barebones document, already formatted for APA, with a paragraph and heading for each section of the rubric. Then, under each heading -- labeled with the individual name of the subtask -- I'll put in a filler paragraph with junk text, just to keep my formatting. Underneath that filler paragraph, I'll write my notes in red, along with whatever the highest-scoring criteria is for that particular section of the rubric. Then, as I'm writing my paper, section by section, I have my notes right there in the document so that I don't have to switch back and forth between several screens, and I have my criteria for success right in front of me.

For each task I have a printed copy of the Rubric in front of me, I go over the reading materials with the rubric and screen clip useful information into OneNote for access later. Once I am done gathering all the necessary information I have OneNote opened up on one monitor and my paper opened up on another monitor and I start typing from there. I do a final check with the rubric just to make sure I answered everything.

[corpsole2]

I see that WGU is not AACSB accredited. I wonder how or if that affects the quality of the MBA?

I know plenty of people around here in Seattle who look at WGU Washington as another diploma mill from which they would never hire a graduate.

For myself, I am exploring WGU for my MBA program, but am keeping my options open. I like how inexpensive it is compared to even most state business schools, and I like that I could complete it in less time than normal.

What I am concerned about is acceptance should I put it on a resume. Has anyone had a problem with prospective employers or not gotten promoted because they had a WGU degree? Does anyone even care? I'd love to get into a mid level management position here in Seattle, and I know an MBA will go a long way towards that goal. I just don't want to have to explain it to the educational snobs in my state.

[dmjacobsen]

I have found that there are 2 ways to approach the WGU MBA. The "I want to learn and take the time to absorb the information" approach or the "I want a check in the box so I want to get it done as fast as possible" approach. The first approach you pretty much read the material take notes or use OneNote as one student suggested in the communities. The second approach you can pretty much google a lot of the information you need to satisfy the tasks (not actual papers, but topics in the tasks) and write your papers out accordingly. I personally am going with both approaches. On topics that I know a lot about already I use approach 2 and on topics I'm not strong on I use approach 1.

I do the same thing, which is one of the key benefits of the competency-based approach, as advertised by WGU -- learn what you need to learn, don't spend a lot of time on what you already know.

Unfortunately, I agree with your assessment on the writing of papers and the grading thereof. When I first started WGU for undergrad, I attempted to write papers in traditional essay format. I've always been a great paper writer and have never had a hard time cranking out papers, so long as I was knowledgeable on the topic. Once I started at WGU, my world was turned upside-down and my first several papers failed miserably. Since I was writing in traditional format, the graders weren't able to find the information they were looking for -- even though it was there -- resulting in a task returned for revision. Eventually, I learned to do the "rubric section as paragraph heading" format and have had much more success.

[dmjacobsen]

I see that WGU is not AACSB accredited. I wonder how or if that affects the quality of the MBA?

This has been discussed ad nauseam here and in other forums. Many MBA programs are not AACSB accredited, and I don't think that many SMB employers look for that accreditation. If you're looking for an executive management position at Microsoft or Google it might be a problem. Otherwise, not so much. As for how or whether or not it affects the quality of the program, I can't say.

I know plenty of people around here in Seattle who look at WGU Washington as another diploma mill from which they would never hire a graduate.

I know plenty of people around here who see Vanderbilt's NP program as an NP mill that churns out hundreds of poorly-qualified NP's every year. What does that say about Vanderbilt? I say, if someone doesn't want to hire me because of where I got my degree, I probably wouldn't want to work for them anyway.

What I am concerned about is acceptance should I put it on a resume. Has anyone had a problem with prospective employers or not gotten promoted because they had a WGU degree? Does anyone even care? I'd love to get into a mid level management position here in Seattle, and I know an MBA will go a long way towards that goal. I just don't want to have to explain it to the educational snobs in my state.

I can say that my WGU BSN has never been a topic of question or concern by my employer, my peers, nor my MSN program's faculty and admissions personnel. I don't know how the MBA will be viewed. I think that if you already have a position at a company, it will definitely help you advance. If you're trying to get your foot in the door, it's more of a check-the-box situation, and your interviewing skills and experience will play a larger role.