Contact hour

In a traditional campus delivery, AMBA expects contact hours to be delivered entirely synchronously. Online and blended programs may move some of the 500 off the live clock, but not below 120 live hours. The remaining hours — 380 if you sit on the minima — must still be mandatory interactive faculty-student group learning or mandatory interactive faculty-supervised peer-to-peer group learning. Recorded lectures fail. Solo homework fails. A Slack channel with no faculty fails.

That definition is stricter than a U.S. seat hour. A 3-credit U.S. course has about 45 scheduled class hours, which would be contact if the class is required, with faculty, and with the group. The associated 90 homework hours are learning effort, not contact.

AMBA’s own briefing language is blunt: one-to-one support does not count as a contact hour. Thesis supervision is the usual example. Coaching a single EMBA student through a company project is the same failure if it never returns to the group.

Example: campus MBA with 20 courses times 30 class meetings times 1.5 hours equals 900 scheduled hours. That clears 500 without using any async. Online MBA with 120 hours of live seminar, 200 hours of mandatory faculty-moderated case forums, and 180 hours of faculty-supervised team rooms: 500. Same floor, different mix. Online MBA with 80 live hours and 420 hours of video: not 500 contact hours, however long the videos run.

Unit	Floor (AMBA MBA)	Includes homework?	Includes 1:1 advising?
Contact hour	500 (120 sync)	No	No
Learning effort	1,800	Yes	Yes
U.S. credit hour	None (local total)	Yes	Sometimes as other academic work

Only if they are mandatory, interactive, and faculty-supervised. A voluntary Sunday study group is learning effort. AMBA criterion 3.23 wants faculty in the loop for the non-synchronous remainder of the 500.

Schools define the hour. U.S. clock hours are 50–60 minutes inside a 60-minute period. AMBA is counting hours of interaction. Do not inflate 500 by treating every 50-minute slot as 1.0 without stating the rule.

They can contribute to both, because they are different ledgers. The residency’s live group time is contact. The course’s credit value is registrar work. Adding the integers together is meaningless.

AMBA’s MBA is a group degree. Peer learning is part of the product. Tutorials are a different product. The definition is written to stop schools from filling 500 hours with private advising.