Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63913
ten minutes. Once you graduate, you have to begin to learn. will certainly make a difference, but it is just a new way to deliver teaching. It forces you to restructure what you offer. Perhaps the one certainty is that we will develop a number of alternative ways of delivering management education and management learning as a result of the new technologies. For example, online education will most likely play an important role in the delivery of education to already highly schooled adults, an area that represents the frontier of higher education. Internet. Yes, it's true that the way most schools do it, by taking a course that a good professor delivers, filming it, and putting it on the Internet, is impersonal. That doesn't work. With every new medium, you have to change the message and the format. And you must get feedback. I recently developed ten one-hour online courses, and we built feedback into the program. Questions are asked, answers are given by the students, and I comment on the answers and give better possible answers or offer other solutions. It took us a long time to work out the process, but our customers think it is our most important feature. They don't feel the Internet class is impersonal, and it isn't. It's no more impersonal than a large lec- ture class. In fact, it's more personal. Regarding the overall impact of such technologies, I think it is too early to tell. For example, I am working with several large consumer-brand companies, and one of the things we are learn- ing is that we will have to move from one method of distribu- tion to three. While the consumer will still buy many items at the supermarket or discount store, some commodities—we don't know which ones—will be bought, for the most part, online. Some products will be bought online but delivered through the supermarket. So the large consumer goods com- panies must learn how to distribute their products through three different channels, and we don't know yet which prod- ucts will be distributed which way. The auto industry provides another example of how difficult it is to predict the impact of technology on car sales. We all thought that new cars couldn't be sold on the Internet, but 60 percent of all new car purchases are now being decided on the Internet. After limiting or eliminating the choices, the car buyer goes to a dealer. Similarly, everybody was quite sure that you could not sell used cars over the Internet, but amazingly enough, that is the area that is growing the fastest. In the same way, we don't know yet exactly how the new learn- ing technologies will affect higher education. Online technology Why do you consider highly schooled adults to be the frontier of education? This is where I think we will see tremendous changes—in the education of older people, especially the education of people who are already at work. Not primarily because of technology— technology is just the enabler—but because the idea of continu- ous learning is taking over. Knowledge makes itself obsolete every ten minutes. Once you graduate, you have to begin to learn. And so the continuing edu- cation of already highly schooled adults is not only going to pro- vide an additional dimension and an enormous opportunity to higher education, but it will also change what we teach and where we deliver it. It will revolutionize the way we deliver management educa- tion, because that traditional full-time student sitting in the classroom is the wrong recipient for this type of education. A good deal of teaching will still be done in the classroom, but much of it will take place off campus in groups. Much will occur online, and much will be accomplished through self-study. Perhaps the single most important medium will be special tools that are adapted for use at home, with built-in visual and audio feedback mechanisms. Another factor is that management education is more and more the concern of the employing organization. As a result, management schools will increasingly work with outside organi- zations to create management education programs that fit the organization's needs. Quite a number of corporate universities have been founded in the last few years, and not just in large businesses. I am working with the management of two corporate universities that were developed by two national nonprofits. Such organizations see the management school as a resource and as a producer, but not necessarily as the exclusive provider of man- agement education. In our very small school, Claremont Graduate School in BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 California, there is a constant demand for us to take our courses 15