In a typical year, Professor Ed Hess figures he teaches no more than 300 students in his courses on managing smaller enterprises and the challenges of business growth. About 120 of them are MBAs, while the remaining 180 are executive education students at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.
When Hess walks into the classroom this January to teach Smart Growth for Private Businesses, however, as many as 50,000 people are expected to have signed up for it -- more students than Darden has graduated since its founding nearly 60 years ago and in all probability the largest single audience ever assembled for a business course.
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