Enhancing Online Executive Education Using Storytelling: An Approach to Strengthening Online Social Presence

One distinctive requirement of Executive Education is the need to integrate the corporate experiences of participants and frame them within a common body of knowledge wherein experiences can be shared, analyzed, and absorbed by all participants. What might customarily arise out of classroom camaraderie must now be technologically designed and supported from the outset in online executive education. Our research question is: What can be done to develop online executive programs that utilize the richness of executive experiences as the foundation for analyzing, comprehending, and retaining key concepts learned throughout the course? Storytelling is proposed as a method to capture and use corporate experiences of participating executives in meaningful ways while developing a strong social presence among participants online. This study explores organizational stories, identifying unique story elements and their purposes, and discussing how they can be introduced into online executive courses through modeled behavior, a part of social cognitive theory. Storytelling is compared to traditional case studies and chat rooms. While storytelling may be more difficult to implement, there are significant advantages to storytelling, including making the experience more real, increasing comprehension of concepts, and improving the retention of knowledge.