The Challenge

A graduate business school needed to migrate a flagship 15-week Strategic Management course from in-person to fully asynchronous online delivery. The course was taught by a senior faculty member with 20+ years of in-person experience — and significant skepticism about online learning’s ability to replicate the depth of dialogue that defined her teaching approach.

My Approach

After faculty interviews to understand what was truly irreplaceable, the course was redesigned around weekly structured discussion protocols. Each week followed the same rhythm:

• Short video lecture (12–18 minutes, recorded in Camtasia)
• Case reading and individual case brief submission
• Structured asynchronous discussion with role-assigned perspectives
• Faculty video response to discussion themes (8–10 minutes weekly)
• Formative application quiz

Rather than open-ended prompts, students were assigned roles (devil’s advocate, synthesizer, challenger) that rotated weekly — replicating the dynamics of a Socratic case classroom without requiring synchronous attendance. All video assets were hosted in Kaltura for accessibility-compliant caption generation. The final assessment was a capstone strategic analysis presented as a recorded video pitch.

Outcomes

End-of-course evaluation scores for the online version matched or exceeded the in-person version across most measures. Discussion quality ratings were actually higher online — students attributed this to the structured roles removing the social dynamic of dominant voices. The faculty member requested to teach the online section exclusively the following year.