For San Francisco Bay University Provost Brad Fuster, standard online degrees are built on a flawed assumption: that simply converting a physical classroom into a digital file creates a meaningful learning experience.
“If you look at what goes on in higher ed with online learning, very typically, you’ll take a class that existed in a face-to-face format, 16 weeks in a classroom with a 16-chapter textbook,” Fuster said. “And that faculty member will work with an instructional designer to take that course and put it in a learning management system. What that does is just scale mediocrity.”
SFBU MBA Pro+ started somewhere else: a blank whiteboard. “We looked at every single interaction, every learning opportunity with the student, and we baked in very intentional design elements to maximize the student’s learning and the student’s time,” Fuster said. “We didn’t just take a face-to-face class and dump it in a Learning Management System.”
We sat down with Fuster to talk about how the program actually got built, and why that construction process, more than any single feature, separates it from a typical online degree.
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Redefining Access: Affordability and the Silicon Valley Mindset
Fuster’s case for SFBU MBA Pro+ begins with a simple observation about who gets left out of graduate business education.
“I think access is super important: there are millions of learners who would seek an MBA degree. Either they don’t have time or opportunity, or it just doesn’t fit their life,” Fuster said. “We want to serve those students and provide them with a really high-quality, affordable alternative.”
That affordability shows up in the numbers. MBA Pro+ charges $10,000 total tuition, billed at $833 per course as students complete it rather than as a lump sum. Students in the program’s first three cohorts qualify for at least a $750 scholarship.
Building a program that relies on AI-driven personalization required faculty buy-in. Fuster said that wasn’t a hard sell at SFBU. “The faculty at SFBU bring decades of professional experience working in all of the amazing companies that border SFBU,” he said. “SFBU sits in the shadow of the Tesla factory. Right down the road, we have Google and Apple and Amazon.”
That proximity, Fuster argued, made the case for him. “There was no need to convince them that we needed to co-design with AI, to ensure our students are AI-centered and ready for the world of work with AI,” he said. “They knew this… Faculty were already there and excited and eager to take this journey.”
The Interactive Classroom: AI Avatars and ‘Guide on the Side’ Faculty
Co-designing with AI didn’t just change how courses got built. It changed what faculty are for, according to Fuster.
“Faculty used to be the keepers of the content. Faculty used to profess, right?” he said. “I would stand in the front of the room as the expert — because I have a doctorate in this thing we’re talking about—and I would lecture, and students would take notes… and then students would go on their own, do research, go to the library, read books, write papers, submit the papers, we would grade the papers, and that’s how I knew if students were learning or not. Those days are over.”
Elevating the Human Connection: The ‘Guide on the Side’
In MBA Pro+, content delivery is handled through technology, freeing faculty to step into what Fuster calls the ‘guide on the side’: the office-hours conversation, the gut check before a hard decision, the relationship that carries a student through a rough patch.
“The learning, the content, the knowledge, that’s all beautifully designed and laid out for the student to experience at their own pace in our learning management system,” Fuster said. “The faculty member is there to have kind of the out-of-class experience, the office-hour experience… we’ve worked really hard to put the faculty member in that role, the guide by the side, not the sage on the stage.”
That shift extends to the broader support system around students. “The support for our students is genuine, and it is robust,” Fuster said. “We have mental health services available for our students, we have financial services available for our students, we have academic services. Students who might have learning differences will be supported. We have a librarian to help students with research and access resources that they might need.”
An Interruptible Professor: Personalized AI Instruction
Ask Fuster what feature of MBA Pro+ excites him most, and he goes straight to the video lectures, which aren’t really lectures in the traditional sense.
“In the first module of most of the classes, there’s a 10-minute video lecture. You can stop that lecture; you can chat with the professor, which is an AI avatar of the professor that you’re listening to. You can ask questions, you can interrupt it, you can ask for things in a different language, you can ask for it to be explained differently if you’re just not getting it. And you can do that as much as you want,” Fuster said.
The AI avatar is trained on the human instructor’s own pedagogy, according to Fuster, and it’s available around the clock. “Our goal is to give students the best version of the best professor that anyone’s ever had,” he said, comparing the approach to the self-driving cars operating a few miles from campus. “I like to think of it as Waymo… the driving experience is actually superior to a human. They will always make the right and most cautious decision to give the rider the most superior experience. That’s kind of our North Star with the Pro+ programs.”
The same model shows up in skills practice. “There’s a negotiator module. We’ve programmed an avatar to be your boss. You can practice negotiating with that avatar back and forth as much as you want in a very safe environment, and get feedback in real time. You can practice over and over and over again until you’re really perfect,” Fuster explained.
Personalized Learning: Flexible Pacing and Intentional Design
Flexibility in MBA Pro+ isn’t limited to in-course interaction—it defines the entire schedule. Course timelines adapt to the student’s speed rather than a fixed university syllabus.
“A lot of other online programs, there’s a lockstep cohort model that a module will open on Sunday night, and you have until Friday to do it,” Fuster said. “We don’t have that. We have very flexible pacing.”
Each MBA Pro+ course runs on an adjustable timeline, according to Fuster.
“The Pro+ programs are designed to be flexibly paced,” he said. “A student can do a course in as little as four weeks or as many as eight weeks… The entire MBA can be done in as few as nine months or as many as 24 months.”
New cohorts start every month, so prospective students don’t have to wait for a fall or spring semester to begin. Students take one course at a time through their first several courses, then have the option to take two at once.
Accessibility got the same deliberate treatment, according to Fuster, rather than arriving as a late addition. “We looked at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the WCAG standards for color, for font, for screen reader access, for subtitles and captioning,” he said. “All of the Pro+ programs are designed with the very best principles of accessibility.”
The ability to interrupt a lecture and ask for a different explanation serves the same purpose, in his view. “The ability to explain concepts differently or explain them using different words or smaller words or even in another language allows for ultimate accessibility and access to the content,” Fuster said. “We care that the student is learning and learning the material, not that they were able to decipher the one-size-fits-most video that the professor uploaded.”
Built from Scratch: 16,000 Hours Behind One Degree
That level of personalization didn’t happen by accident. Fuster is quick to cite the labor behind it.
“The learning design that went into crafting the Pro+ MBA: we spent 16,000 human hours,” he said. “We had each faculty subject matter expert spend 1,000 hours on their class. Multiply that by 16 classes; that’s 16,000 hours across the entire offering in the MBA Pro+.”
That figure only covers subject-matter design. “We then had our tech team making sure that all of the AI features are tuned and trained and working beautifully,” Fuster said. “We have instructional designers making sure that things are easy to click through, easy to navigate, and very intuitive. We had UI UX experts test the class to make sure that the user experience and the interface from beginning to end is really a smooth and easy journey.”
The program was rigorously pre-tested. “We prototyped it for months and months and months, and we sent it out to some of the leading subject matter experts in the world,” Fuster said. “We have faculty from Dartmouth and Harvard and some of the world’s very best business schools taking our class, giving us feedback, improving our user experience and the curriculum to make sure that what students are getting is absolutely the best possible content.”
An MBA Designed Around Your Life
By pairing 24/7 AI-driven personalization and flexible calendar pacing with $10,000 total tuition and high-touch faculty guidance, SFBU’s MBA Pro+ eliminates the traditional trade-offs of online education. The result isn’t just another digitized degree—it is a business education engineered from the ground up to adapt to your schedule, your learning style, and your professional goals.
Ready to see how the program fits your goals? Explore the SFBU MBA Pro+ interactive learning experience, reach out to an enrollment advisor to learn more, or start an application to secure your spot in an upcoming monthly cohort.