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when the whole notion of organizations that last forever is vaguely laughable. dents with green hair. We will take pink and blue and orange hair, too." That's the spirit I'm talking about. What are the three most significant changes that you foresee occurring in management education in the next 50 years? Online, online, online. Bricks and mortar is dead. Period. Frankly, I see online education as being the nature of all education beyond about the tenth or eleventh grade. I see it as the essence of university education—nonbusiness universi- ty education as well as the world of business training. And I see people putting together their own portfolios of courses chosen from wherever in the world they wish to choose them, as opposed to paying attention to a curriculum put together by a particular business school. I've been making the argument, with my tongue only slightly in my cheek, that 20 years from now I don't expect us even to have university degrees. Instead, I think on the wall behind people's desks will be a series of certificates that come from their courses, mostly online, that fulfill specific needs relative to their various projects. For example, I take over a certain kind of project, and so I go online and find a course somewhere or another that fills a knowledge gap that I have relative to that particular project. A hundred of those will constitute my formal education. What will make online education work? In other words, is it necessary to have a high-touch component? Online education is already working. Something like 70 per- cent of IBM's corporate training is now done online. And the company has done that in an insanely short period of time, like 24 months. It also has saved a ton of money, like a couple hundred million dollars. I don't buy that high touch is necessary. First, people are already giving higher valuations to the online stuff. At IBM, for example, it is my under- standing that the course evaluation scores are higher for the online training than they were for the classroom-taught training. Years ago, National Technological University was one of the real pioneers in online education, and it was get- ting higher evaluation scores back then. So, the notion that the high-touch part has to be there is not necessarily true. Number two, it's all irrelevant. Because ten years from now, when the young men and women who grew up with Xboxes, Game Boys, and PlayStations, who lived by the screen from the age of two, make it into management, their skills will be cou- pled with the fact that the technology will be infinitely better than what we have now. The world will be entirely different. I do recognize that there are lovely mixed models that include a high-touch element. The former marketing direc- tor of my wife's home furnishings company recently changed jobs to go to work for a construction company. Her husband is the technical boss, and she will be the business boss. She just enrolled this fall in the utterly fabulous, marvelous, incredible distance learning MBA program at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Over the course of 20 months, she will spend about eight weeks total on campus, either in Durham, North Carolina, or at the Fuqua School of Business Europe in Frankfurt, Germany. The rest of her time is spent doing online stuff. As part of that, she's participating in online chat rooms every night for about three hours. It's a wonderful mixed model. So I acknowledge the mixed model, but I do not think it is imperative. And I don't think it's going to be imperative at all ten years from now when broadband really becomes a real- ity, when everybody has infinite digital capability, when the quality of the learning experiences provided online is ten times better than it is today. Online education is already work- ing, and it's still primitive. Just wait until it gets good. ■z z Christy Chapman, based in Winter Garden, Florida, is a free-lance writer. BizEd MAY/JUNE 2002 19