EDE and the 2050 Challenge: It's About Time

What is the 2050 Challenge?

Mention “distance education” and most people think of overcoming the limitations of space. From the earliest “correspondence courses” to the latest online offerings, distance education has been thought of generally in physical terms, affording learning opportunities to people for whom getting to campus can be a bit of a challenge.

Certainly, EDE at Iowa State is all about overcoming that kind of distance: whether you’re in Des Moines or New Delhi, we have the world-class teachers, training, and technology to bring you the best in engineering education. But for us, “distance education” goes far beyond mere distance in the physical sense to include time as well.

By the year 2050, there will be more than 9 billion people on this small spaceship Earth. With our numbers burgeoning, our planet warming, and our supplies of energy and other natural resources dwindling, what must we as engineers do today, tomorrow, and the next 15,000-odd tomorrows after that to ensure that by 2050 we have:

* Enough food and potable water for 9 billion people?
* Reliable communications for people worldwide?
* New medical technologies against emerging threats to health?
* Robust and secure transportation networks?
* Renewable, non-polluting sources of energy?

Because these are fundamentally engineering challenges, we as engineers are challenged as never before to see beyond the next five to ten years (here’s one instance where “2020 vision” is nearsighted!) to envision instead the breadth and length of our careers in the profession. For many of us, that means seeing all the way to 2050—and beyond.

And when you see further down that road—when you see what the world will need over the course of your working life—you can see what you must do not merely to keep your engineering skills and knowledge current, but beyond that to prepare yourself as an engineer for the challenges we’ll face together by 2050.

So let EDE help you close the distance not only between where you are right now and a state-of-the-art classroom at Iowa State University in Ames, but also between where your career is right now and where it needs to be tomorrow in order to meet the 2050 Challenge—and whatever other challenges you’ll meet in your professional life.
Because at EDE, it’s not just about distance. It’s about time.