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Continued from previous page
You Never Graduate
Jerry Wind, Lauder Professor and professor of marketing,
first started teaching at Wharton in 1967, back when the
Soviet Union was still a world power and man had yet to
set foot on the moon. Over the years, he has helped initiate
a series of educational innovations at Wharton – including
the executive MBA program for working managers, the
Lauder Institute for international studies, and reforms of the
MBA curriculum, as well as founding and directing the
SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management, the first
"think tank" on the future of management education.
His current brainchild, the Wharton Fellows, arose
directly out of discussions with senior executives about the
difficulty of keeping up with new knowledge and business
transformations such as e-business and biosciences. The
Fellows represents one of the most ambitious and creative
attempts to develop a true platform and network for life-long
learning. There is pointedly no graduation ceremony
for the Fellows program. "You don't graduate from the
Fellows," Wind said. "You are inducted into the Fellows.
The Wharton Fellows is built around a collaborative process
between faculty and Fellows. About half of the 100 executives
who have joined the Fellows are involved in continuing
to refine both the content and structure of the program.
"The network of Fellows is two way," he said. "We tell
them about new research we are coming up with, and they
identify challenges important to them so we can work
together to develop solutions. We put together Fellows,
faculty and experts. There is not an assumption that faculty
know everything. This is a different concept of what
education is."
True to its focus, the program itself has been completely
transformed since its inception – several times – in
response to the input of executives and changes in the business
environment. It started as a series of three, one-week
foundation sessions focusing on e-business transformation
followed by a series of shorter programs held in locations
a round the world. The Fellows program has evolved
into a continuous series of short "masters classes" targeting
pressing emerging business topics, and offers members
resources via an ongoing decision support network. "The
objective and focus are the same, but the structure and content
are changing dramatically," Wind said. "As the needs
of the world change so dramatically, it is tough to provide
the right education in the bounds of a traditional program."
Why the Virtual
University Hasn't Gone
the Distance
In January 1995, speakers at a conference on the "virtual
university" sponsored by Wharton's SEI Center and Penn's
School of Engineering said the university was a dinosaur
and that these academic institutions should pack up their
ivy - covered walls and go home. Online education, like
everything else on the Internet, was supposed to transform
the way we live and learn. Like most of the dot-com hype,
there was an element of truth in these insights, but the
truth was much smaller and less dramatic than its proponents
originally thought.
For lifelong education, new technology-based educational
platforms – such as distance learning through
Internet and satellites and interactive CD-ROM courses –
were particularly promising. Part of the challenge of ongoing
education for managers is that they need to take time
away from work and family to travel to a program on a
schedule dictated by the teacher, not the student. Distance
learning offered the promise of learning that was close at
hand, when you needed it. Like new lean manufacturing
approaches to managing inventory, this would be "just-in-time"
learning. Instead of stockpiling knowledge that you
might need years later, you'd have the knowledge on tap
when and where you needed it. Learning could be fluid and
continuous.
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