Keeping pace with change today is harder than ever in the world of business education. Given the extraordinarily competitive market of business schools the need to keep pace with change however continues to remain critical for those MBA schools that set their sites on being the best in the world. It?s not hard to see why. Since the end of the Second World War up until as recently as a generation ago, or less, one could focus on that narrow set of countries that had defined the world?s commercial heights, but no more. We live in a centerless world economy. The US, Europe and Japan all remain large and vital economies, but the real growth is elsewhere and will surely stay there for some time. And so, business education must change, and quickly, to remain relevant and to serve the needs of a new world economy.

Technology calls the shots

Interestingly, the rise of a centerless global economy isn?t the only challenge, or perhaps even the most important one rocking the world of MBA education. While the world economy has rapidly evolved, so too have the technologies that connect it. The revolution of the digital age, through mobile telephony, the internet and positively miraculous software, has transformed the very notions of time, place and distance. Nowadays, everything on a computer or mobile phone can be anywhere and everywhere at anytime for everyone. And, it?s practically free. Today?s students leverage their world through such technologies and are connected to our centerless world in ways unimaginable just a short time ago. Ten seconds and an i-Phone will deliver any fact one can wish for. What does is mean to educate in a world where facts are free and geography means so much less than before?

Technology and globalisation have made practical issues of questions earlier considered theoretical. In graduate school, I can recall deriving all manner of responses to the queries of great economists like Paul Samuelson and Jagdish Bhagwati. ?Suppose we lived in a world of no transportation costs,? they wrote, ?What would happen to wages and the location of production for various industries across the world?? Some questions, which are now quite clear, were so abstract they seemed to escape our imaginations. What if a professor from country A could teach a course in Country B via satellite without ever leaving her office? What if a student in Delhi could take a class at the University of Virginia and challenge a student in New York mid-sentence or support the statements of a colleague in Shanghai in real time? Far from being theoretical arguments, these questions are practical realities that have been shaping the world of business education for at least a decade. While most every college and university has adapted in some form, mastering the use of technology to deliver a more valued and valuable MBA education in the classroom has been hard.

For business schools it is important to understand how technology alters the value of what schools deliver to students. One key effect has been to make near-commodities out of individual lectures. With the ease of digital recording and the delivery of classroom simulations and documents, the one-way dialogue from professor to students can and will increasingly be made free and universally available. And, why not? Once polished and expertly delivered, a lecture?s value is largely captured. The incremental value of having a professor repeat the exercise time and time again is relatively low, particularly if engagement with students and their questions is minimal, as it is in many instances. Moreover, a valuable lecture, or series of lectures, delivered by a master can educate far more students than those who can enter any particular classroom. The former may spread valuable knowledge to teeming masses across the world, whose means would never allow such a privilege. Like the technologies that liberally deliver the world?s great written works for free, digital lectures will reshape the way we think about what business schools deliver.

For the plainest example of how digital lectures will change the value of what schools deliver, look no further than Stanford University?s Engineering school and their SEE (Stanford Education Everywhere) Program (http://see.stanford. edu). In just a few clicks and for no cost at all, you can watch lectures, read class notes and even give yourself exams straight from a top-notch university?s professors. Similar projects can been seen through MIT?s Courseware programme and Apple U, but no similarly broad business school project has yet surfaced. Rest assured it will and with it will come the questions about what it all means for the value of such teaching, such teaching methods and for the students and schools.

In large part, this new ability to commoditise lectures means that the differentiating value of education, and MBA education in particular, cannot lie in widespread, one-way lecture 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.

Using such technologies, we seamlessly overcome distance to ensure that the best students in the world work together to build an enduring, close-knit community. Such is the requirement in a world where being relevant means being global and being global requires a mastery of technology. Of course, it?s not easy to do. Any revolution requires organisations to adapt in difficult ways and to develop new practices and understandings. For schools like mine, where high-engagement learning is in our DNA, this is an exciting time. As the world of education genuinely adapts to new technologies, richer and more valuable, high-engagement experiences are destined to displace valuable, but readily commoditised forms. As they do, look for all leading business schools to be nearer and more accessible than ever.

?The author is associate professor of business administration & associate dean for international affairs at Darden School of Business. He can be reached at RodriguezP@darden.virginia.edu