Working adult students will soon spend much less time traveling and on campus while completing a bachelor’s degree in organizational management from Bluffton University.

The introduction of online learning to the Bluffton Cohort-based Organizational Management Program (BCOMP) should allow them to spend more time at home instead.

The program’s hybrid format, blending in-class and online instruction, will debut with the beginning of spring semester 2015 in January. It reflects the wishes of adult students—as indicated by national studies—who now regularly interact with co-workers and customers worldwide via advanced technology, says Ted Bible, director of admissions for adult and graduate studies at Bluffton.

“We are responding to increased requests from students, and employers, to create a hybrid program that uses available technology,” adds Dr. Karen Klassen Harder, a professor of business and a BCOMP instructor. The format, she says, “prepares students to function in workplaces that increasingly use this technology.”

Since its inception in 1992, BCOMP has produced roughly 1,000 graduates who had already finished two years of college and chose the accelerated, one-class-per-week path to a Bluffton bachelor’s degree. The program has also expanded to two other sites—Edison and Northwest State community colleges, in Piqua and Archbold, respectively—where students will now be able to enroll in either the evening, in-class model or the online hybrid format.

With the general rise of online learning in recent years, the university has been trying to introduce online components to the four-semester program, Bible says. Research studies also indicate a growing trend that adult students’ preference for learning is neither fully in class nor online, but rather a combination of the two, he notes.

Under the new format, students will still take three successive courses in the organizational management major per semester. But only the first class session of each course will be held on campus—a “Saturday seminar,” from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., that may involve such activities as presentations and small-group work as well as lecture, and lunch, Bible points out.

The class will then “meet” online with the instructor the next five Wednesday evenings using Zoom technology, which facilitates online meetings and videoconferences. Bluffton is using the same technology in its master of business administration program and in the new collaborative MBA with Eastern Mennonite University and Goshen College.

Students will be able to log in to the online class sessions wherever they have a good, high-speed Internet connection, Bible says. And assuming that’s at home, a change in class times—to a 6:30-9 p.m. schedule—will also allow a little more family time, possibly including dinner together, he continues. Currently, BCOMP classes are held on campus from 6-10 p.m., meaning that most students must come directly to the university from work, he explains.

Students will also complete and submit class work online, and be able to fulfill general education course requirements through other online offerings, including summer courses.

The online element will enable more opportunities for guest speakers, who can make their presentations from a distance, as well as recording of BCOMP class sessions for possible use later, Bible notes. In addition, he says, it will reduce the number of those sessions held in a campus classroom to 12, from 72 now for the 12, six-week courses in organizational management.

He calls the change “an appropriate step to address the ever-changing student dynamic,” and potentially a way to extend Bluffton’s market, and mission. BCOMP currently draws students from a roughly 60-mile radius, but the need for less driving to campus could attract participants from farther away, maybe meeting a need for prospective students from such places as Mansfield and the Columbus area, he says.

That availability to more potential students, owing to the online component, is “what excites us,” adds Harder.

The hybrid format “has, at its core, a strong focus on the student as a member of a learning community where relationships to each other and to the professor are important,” she notes. “But it also responds to the different learning styles of students,” thus combining, she says, “the best of both worlds.”