Flexible by design: our online course structure explained

I am currently in full time employment, so being able to study at my own time and being able to be in control of my own studying was really important, and Walbrook provided that as part of their online degrees.

And a really important thing for me was how flexible they are with the entry requirements, because everyone's on a different journey and everyone has different past experiences, past qualifications or work experiences.

I have been out of education for a while, so for me, it was really important that they considered that, and they took that part of the acceptance process to the MBA programme.

What’s something you were worried about before starting, that turned out better than expected?

One thing that did worry me a little bit was the degree of self-teaching that I would have to do.

I did worry about, given that it's an online degree, you don't necessarily have the ability to attend lectures or speak to tutors, but I was quickly reminded that is actually not the case.

There's plenty of available resources that you can actually utilise, again at your own time, without having to feel like you're alone./p>

And during this journey, I have actually been able to meet quite a lot of people that are also on the online programme.

And we've kind of built our own community, so we don't feel as alone as we thought, as when you're studying an online degree versus the in-person campus students.

What surprised you most about online learning?

What surprised me most was the degree of flexibility. I knew it was going to be flexible, given that it's an online degree.

However, I didn't quite appreciate the degree of the flexibility, and also not being necessarily bound by any live lecture times or by any tutor support.

Whilst I do have tutor support available, I get to decide at what point I want to use it and for me that's really important.

Can you walk us through a typical day in your life. How do you juggle study, work, and everything else?

A typical day in the life is actually relatively simple. I wake up and I go to work, go into the office. Unfortunately,

I'm not one of the lucky ones that gets to work from home too often. So, for me, having again, an online degree was really important so I can juggle my time.

So, once I get back from the office, life admin takes over and then onto my MBA.

So, I get on to that until late evening. But often because of my full-time job, I may have late evenings, so it allows me to kind of juggle my time.

But evenings I tend to do more for kind of online module work or any self-assessment and then juggle that depending on with basis.

And I try to have a life somewhere in between. 

How has being able to study your way anytime, anywhere helped you reach your goals?

One of my goals was to really be able to manoeuvre studying whilst working full time and being able to study anywhere at any time meant that often I can actually study whilst I'm on holiday, or whilst I'm having a bit of an empty weekend, and that model I think really facilitates being able to take a course and an online degree at any point in your life.

Whether you're fresh out of one degree and going to another, or whether you're a full-time employee like myself, or any other person that's trying to entice a new journey.

That model really works because you're able to juggle it around your current lifestyle rather than the typical degree, which means you have to adapt your lifestyle to the degree, which in this case, it's not the case.