Thanks to a generous alumni gift, the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley will launch a new initiative to explore complementing its classroom learning with online approaches, the school announced this week.
The $1 million gift, from Steve and Susan Chamberlin, MBA ’87, will be made in the form of matching funds to be shared with Berkeley-Haas, the Graduate School of Education, the College of Engineering, the School of Information, the School of Public Health and UC Berkeley Extension in piloting online education initiatives. Together, the six schools have formed a consortium to share knowledge and develop programs most efficiently. As part of a joint effort, each school and the consortium as a whole will work to raise the matching funds to support these initiatives.
“I hope this gift is the catalyst that launches UC Berkeley on the path to being the best in the online space,” Steve Chamberlin, who is also a former member of the Haas professional faculty, said in a statement. “It’s less important to be first than to develop the background and the qualitative measures to do online education really well.”
“Technology has progressed to the point where online education is no longer a pale substitute for the traditional lecture hall,” Adam Berman, the Haas School’s executive director of emerging initiatives, said in a statement. Berman will lead the Berkeley-Haas Online Education Pilot and spearhead the consortium.
In 2009, the Chamberlin’s invested $750,000 to launch the Haas School’s Center for Teaching Excellence. Steve is chairman of a California-based real estate development firm and a Pennsylvania-based home building firm, and Susan holds an MBA from Haas and is an architect.
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