I suspect I am pretty close to your target audience. The main reason I chose to reject traditional b-schools was content. Even the ones with so-called entrepreneur programs seemed more focussed on producing investment bankers or advertising execs.

It seems like there are many alternatives out there for online delivery, and all the schools I looked at used case studies from the real world. How will the XBS differentiate itself in this market? Why should a blogger choose your school, especially considering it will be lacking a “name” for a long time to come?

What I wanted in a school was one that would teach me to start a business, and then run it, not to work in one.

I suspect many if not most bloggers share this entrepreneurial drive. I should think then it would be the curriculum, not the media which would attract them. Less focus on accounting and finance, and more on the mechanics of how these things happen.

I’ll give you an example. I recently took a course which I called “business boot camp”. Coming into the course, we all had to have and work on a specific business idea. It didn’t matter if we ever had any intention of starting the business, we still needed the idea.

Every day we worked on those ideas, in class and out. When we talked about market research, we had to go out and do some, and then give a presentation on our particular market.

When we talked about sales funnels and cold calling, our homework was to go to a mall or store and “cold call” 20 people and aske them for their impressions of us. (That was really hard.) But the lesson was well learned.

Having our own “babies” involved made us far more involved in the material. We also got direct and invaluable support and criticism from the class on each facet of our business idea.

Now, this course was 3 weeks (truly just a boot camp), and when it was over, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d pay a lot of money to take an MBA structured like that program. Even if the students didn’t want to start businesses, I suspect they’d be valuable employees.

Russell, Yes, this will be tricky, getting everyone in sync, and yes, your model let’s people work off line. The case study method could be made to work if people can get an hour at their desks for class participation. I don’t know if this is practical or not. Maybe it’s lunch time: noon EST, 17:00 in London and 9 in the morning west coast time. It sounds like Peter has a fix on the tech that will help. And yeah I think we can afford the logo but having our colors done, that’s gonna cost. Thanks, Grant

Something more conversational and collaborative would be better, but I don’t know how to do that when everyone has proper jobs, they’re scattered across timezones and the technology uptake varies. And I’m not experienced enough with IM etc to know if you can do ‘nuance’ well.

I hoped that the real ‘teaching’ would emerge in the comments/discussion after the event but that’s not happened yet. Still, it’s early days. DoThinkPlan, that’s my motto, I’ve done some doing, maybe I should move onto the Thinking phase.

More positively – I’m sure $100 million would get the XBS through the first couple of weeks and a logo design.

Ideally, I think you will need semantic annotation, folksonomies, argumentatation structures, etc, so that online discussions and contributions can be classified, summarized, archived, searched and reasoned-over (eg, automatically comparing one class’s discussions with another’s).