Business education in an instant world

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: styles where students passively observe and memorize what their professors say and write. What can be taught this way can be taught much more inexpensively and conveniently and by far fewer professors. This is not to say that such lectures are not valuable or that a diversity of opinion and styles are not needed. Rather, it seems that this way of teaching, which is the predominant way of teaching MBA students, just won’t differentiate one set of graduates from another.

Technology meets classroom

What will remain value-creating for MBAs and all students is the rare and truly high-engagement learning style where students are always active participants, professors are masters of multiparty, cross-cultural dialogue and all are co-deliverers in the classroom. Technology will change this too, to be sure, but it is meeting this challenge that promises to deliver more value and truly differentiated graduates for the 21st century. What technology has helped reveal is how much of the value of the one-way lecture style was based on limited access rather than anything particular to the classroom and its inhabitants. Now, using the same technologies that challenge the structure and style of traditional education, we can and are leveraging the awesome possibilities of a centerless and instant world economy.

A decade ago when the mad push for electronic ‘distance’ education began in earnest it was incapable of complementing high-engagement learning. At the Darden School of Business, where high-engagement learning is paramount, we caution, rightly it turns out, to start down the path of heavy use of new video Web-based technologies. But now we do and are doing more every day because we can use the technology to bring together the best students in real time and engage them and their questions in much the way we do so in Charlottesville, Virginia. Each class, done virtually using high-end cameras and experienced professors, remains a piece of a broader transformational experience, where being together, in time if not in geography, matters greatly because everyone creates the experience.