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JULY | AUGUST 2015 BizEd 45 of California, Berkeley, added what it calls "Immersion Weeks" to its 19-month Berkeley MBA for Executives. Throughout the program, students make weeklong visits to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Shang- hai, and Washington, D.C. Each immersion week includes a capstone course based on a theme unique to its location. The last student cohort completed a capstone on entrepreneur- ship in Silicon Valley while visiting Google, Airbnb, and Facebook, as well as emerging startups. Students examined the intersection between business and policymaking in D.C. while meeting with policymakers such as Janet Yellen, chairman of the Federal Reserve. They studied applied innovation in San Francisco and international business in Shanghai. The school will move its international capstone from Shanghai to Brazil in 2016, and to Singapore in 2017. The experiential, accelerated learning that such immersions o'er has become especially attractive to high-level profession- als, says Mike Rielly, executive director of the Berkeley MBA for Executives. "We have seen some significant transformations in our students," he says. "They started the Silicon Valley im- mersion week thinking, 'How do they do that?' and ended the week saying, 'I can do that!'" So far, says Rielly, ten members of the class of 2014 have launched their own startups. Entering emerging economies. In July 2013, the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany expanded its seven-year partnership with the Protestant University in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa to form the new Central Africa Europe Business School (CAEBS). Just two months later, in September, CAEBS launched its first Executive MBA program. The program enrolled 39 students in 2013, and 38 in 2014. Most of the program is delivered in the capital city of Kinshasa, with one half of the courses taught by local professors and the other half by six Frankfurt School faculty, who fly to Kinshasa. Students also travel to Frankfurt for "Executive Week" to attend lectures and visit German companies. All courses are delivered face-to-face, and so far all of the students have been from the Congo except one, who flew in from Eastern Africa. In large part, the curriculum addresses the local business context. For example, one module familiarizes students with the Organisation for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa, or OHADA, a new sys- tem of accounting laws adopted by 17 countries in West and Central Africa. Because so few case studies or textbooks include information on issues such as this that are unique to business in Sub-Saharan Africa, the local faculty who teach in the program are all the more important, says Udo Ste'ens, dean of the Frankfurt School. "It is surprising how well they contextualize our content," he says. "They bring their own backgrounds, which relate to the di¦culties African businesses face." Co-taught by European faculty in English and local faculty in French, the program fills a clear need, says Ste'ens. "With an urban population of 11 million, and 50 million people in the region, Kinshasa has a lot of international business," he says. "These companies have to recruit in a market where people are not appropriately equipped with management skills." Staying on top of technology. To develop EMBA programs with greater reach, business schools must continue to explore and adopt online learning technologies. That reality drives the 21-month Blended Learning MBA program (formerly the Fast-Track MBA) at Babson College in Babson Park, Massachusetts. Babson's version of an EMBA, the program was originally launched in 2001 as a custom- ized MBA program for executives at the tech corporation Intel, before it was opened to general enrollment in 2005. In the last few years, the makeup of the cohort has shifted, says Michael Cummings, the program's director. It now attracts entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, engineers, nonprofit professionals, and others outside the traditional business world; executives, in fact, are the minority. Because students in the Blended Learning MBA program are trending younger, they also tend to be more technologically driven and more mobile. And now that many airlines provide fee-based Wi-Fi ser- vice on flights, these individuals consider the hours they spend on airplanes as prime study time, says Cummings. Between 60 to 70 percent of the Blended Learning MBA program is delivered online, synchronously on the WebEx platform and asynchronously on interactive discussion boards that support multimedia content. Babson faculty will continue to create more interactive cases and videos for this group of students, says Cummings. "From a delivery standpoint, we must be constantly re-evaluating and improving our technology," he says. "Our professors meet regularly with each other and with our instructional designer to learn about new technologies. This trend isn't going to stop." EMBA students want three attributes in their programs: a great brand, a convenient format, and professionally diverse classmates.