Pedagogy Across Three Continents

Sarah Murray:

Aside from having capital Ps in their names, Pittsburgh, Prague and São Paolo might seem to have little in common.
The first has an industrial heritage as a US steel hub. The second, in central Europe and once part of the Soviet bloc, has an historic district that is a World Heritage Site, and the third, founded by Jesuit priests, is the capital of Brazil’s most populous state and one of the most dynamic cities in Latin America.
What links all three is the global executive MBA delivered by the Joseph M Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
Katz has been running an EMBA programme since 1972, a time when Pittsburgh had one of the US’s highest number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the city. In 1990, the school started offering an EMBA programme in the Czech Republic, in Prague and, since 2000, in São Paolo, Brazil.
Until 2003, the three programmes operated as independent entities. Students from the Prague and Brazil campuses would come to Pittsburgh for two-week periods, but because they were at different stages in the curriculum, they did not interact with each other or with the other students from Pittsburgh.