Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/47623
"To believe that the sum product of the Internet and e-learning has already been invented would be naïve." — Robert Pittinsky of Blackboard, in 2002 Well, that didn't quite happen. LearnTrac is no more, and Palm Pilot has been absorbed by HP. "Handhelds" evolved into smartphones and other mobile devices. But stories regarding the increased use of polling software appeared in BizEd's Technology pages in the years that followed, until eventually poll- ing students became commonplace. Free online education. In January/February 2003, BizEd reported the launch of OpenCourseWare (OCW) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cam- bridge. OCW would include the materials for 32 MIT courses in 16 academic departments online for free. "We're fighting the commercialization of knowledge in much the same way that open-source people are fight- ing the commercialization of software," said a univer- sity spokesperson. Flash forward: As of July 2011, OCW offered 2,074 courses, including full video of 46 courses. In addition, 987 courses have been translated into different languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Persian, and Chi- nese. The site averages 1 million visits each month and boasts a total 122 million visits by 87 million users from, by its own measure, every country in the world. This year, the school made its OCW LectureHall iPhone app available, which allows users to stream video lectures on their mobile devices, post to forums, interact with friends via social media, and take notes as they watch content. Those are just a few of the topics that appeared in BizEd's Technology department in our first issues. Since its first year, BizEd has gone from handheld computers to smartphones, from MySpace to Facebook, from portals to apps, from the Kindle to the iPad2, from SecondLife to serious games. Educators are still debating what the technological landscape will look like in ten years. As for what's happening in technology right now? The pages that follow are a good place to start. Steve Jobs' Legacy JUST AS THIS ISSUE of BizEd was going to press, we received the news of the passing of Steve Jobs, the founder, CEO, and visionary behind Apple. Whether through iPhone apps, iPad integration, case studies on Apple's suc- cess, or analyses of Jobs' personal leadership style, business education has been changed, directly and indirectly, by Jobs and the company he built. Jobs also could be the most-discussed entrepreneur- turned-successful CEO who didn't go to business school, by educators and industry watchers alike. Regardless, over the last two years, we've seen Apple products change how business pro- fessors teach and students learn. As John Pliniussen, a professor from Queen's Uni- versity in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, put it the day after Jobs' death: "Jobs was for business what the Beatles were to music: paradigm shifting." It seems appropriate to mark Jobs' passing in this issue, which is devoted to the transformation of business education. We anticipate the innovations on their way to business classrooms as the result of Jobs' ideas and products. BizEd November/December 2011 75 PAUL SAKUMA/AP PHOTO TETRA/GLOW IMAGES