We hear a lot these days about the world being flat. Due largely to advancements in technology, the playing field has been leveled for many organizations looking to compete on a global scale. This "flattening" is what has led many in higher education to look beyond the walls of their classrooms and engage students across the globe. Most recently, UNC's Keenan-Flagler Business School has received a lot of attention for its decision to be the first top-20 business program to offer a fully online MBA.
The decision does not come without its share of risks. Can the quality of the program be sustained online? How will current students and alumni feel about the move? Will faculty be willing to participate?
However, while seemingly risky, Kenan-Flagler Dean James W. Dean Jr. has said that online class delivery is "radically different" and will help the school "define the direction of global business education.”
UNC and Dean recognize that even for state institutions, today's world is one without borders...or at least conventional borders. This line of thinking is certainly relevant to online institutions and programs, but what about traditional brick and mortar institutions?
What if current thinking of geography were altered based on how people actually interact with one another?
A recent study by MIT, sponsored by IBM and AT&T, finds that mobile communications is doing just that...helping to redraw community boundaries.
According to the study, which uses mobile communications data to plot real-world community interactions, "Cities play an important role in defining community boundaries, as they tend to pull nearby counties into their radius of influence. This radius of influence depends on factors such as size, population density and geography of the city’s surroundings. The researchers explain cities' radius of influence in terms of laws similar to Newton's laws of gravitation: Larger places attract more people and businesses than smaller ones, and the attraction between closer places is greater than that between remote ones. As a first approximation, the likelihood of two people communicating with one another depends on the respective populations of the origin and destination of the call, and drops off according to the distance between them."
This is something that most old-school advertisers have known for quite some time, which is why radio and television advertisers pay close attention to Metropolitan Statistical Areas when conducting their media buys. However, it may not always be obvious to folks looking to recruit students based on geography. The MIT project states, "Administrative boundaries are often at odds if one compares these to a bottom up approach calculating the regional delineation only based on how people interact. Communities based on call data is one example of how such interaction-based communities can be defined. The result is striking in that some states merge and others split."
Sometimes a State is just a State. Other times, you've got North Jersey and South Jersey, and the communities and interactions that form around each may be very different. And, perhaps we should take these virtual boundaries into account when we approach them with our marketing messages.
For more, check out the The Connected States of America project website here.
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