What Harvard Business School Learned From Its First Online Program

The interaction from the students who had never met each other or the faculty surprised the group. “The team got really jazzed by that,” says Kierstead. A Disney intern posted a quarterly earnings release and said she finally understood the numbers. It was gratifying and really neat to see.”

THE FACULTY DECIDED A HANDS-OFF APPROACH WAS BEST

The students especially engaged with the peer help discussion boards on the platform. “We weren’t intervening in the program once it started,” says Anand. “We engineered it so there was a lot of upfront time and effort to make it self-standing on its own. We then incentivized students to help each other. The students flocked to those discussion forums and the number of questions being resolved completely by peer group was surprising. That was one of the most gratifying things of the program.”

The faculty monitored the discussion boards and debated whether it not it should move in, but decided to stay away. “Often times you see discussions and you want to jump in,” says Anand. “Half way through the program, we were having a meeting and saying let’s try to figure out a way for the faculty to get involved. We have seen that the process works without us, but we wondered if we could enhance it. Someone said, ‘Don’t intervene. The discovery process is working fine. You will stop the discussion and crowd out the discovery process if you intervene.’”

Anand says he believes the decision to replicate Harvard’s case study approach online also was well received by the first student group. “Active learning put people on the edge of the seats,” he says. “You can’t go for more than four or five minutes without having to do something on the platform. The video of protagonists draw you into a problem through the eyes of a business manager. It’s very different than reading a textbook. There is this unpredictability to the platform: a cold call, a request to reflect, or a student going to the peer hub to answer a classmate’s question. The social learning came in profiles, incentives to help others in the peer hub, the ability to see what others were saying on a question and to converse with them. We were pretty convinced going in that we had created something interesting. This was the single most gratifying thing of the whole experience.”

NEW LEARNINGS FROM ONLINE MAY BE BROUGHT INTO THE PHYSICAL CLASSROOM

Of course, one drawback to online learning was the lack of a real, live interchange among participants. “Not having a synchronous conversation, you lose a little bit but there are other things you gain that we didn’t anticipate,” contends Anand. “At the end of the module, we asked students what did you learn. We had 600 responses in a day. We figured out that the faculty doesn’t need to end the class with our take. The students do it for themselves. Students are perfectly able to summarize and and have closing discussions. So we are asking ourselves whether there are ways to integrate that into the physical classroom.”

Similarly, the school found that the case studies—accompanied by video snippets of managers—was even more engaging than the more typical 15-pages of text. “In an online video, you know what the manager looks like and how he or she talks. In three minutes you could do so much more than you can in a text document. These are ways the case method is enhanced. This is at the core of everything we did,” says Anand.

Adds Kierstead: “In a typical classroom, a professor does a cold call and one student answers. Online, you can cold call a third of the students with the same question at the same time. It adds to the richness of the discussion and the learning.”

THE SECOND ITERATION OF THE PROGRAM IS FOR SPONSORED EMPLOYEES OF COMPANIES

In the first group, Harvard also allowed a few companies to sign up employees for the program. The newest CORe program, begun last month, has only a B-to-B cohort with six or seven organizations each sending 50 to 70 students into the program. Most companies are having relatively new hires enroll, those with three to five years of experience in their firms, at the same $1,500 price point.

“We feel comfortable about the B-to-C market in the age group we targeted,” says Anand.  The next stage comes as we expand the cohorts. Do we want a specific age group specific or country? Do we want to mix them up? All kinds of things. We reduced the cohort size to about 500 in this next B-to-C phase. It’s not clear to us that 600 is the right number to get to know each other well. Maybe it is 150 or 300.”

HBS says its next B-to-C offering on the platform would occur early in the new year and be open to students internationally. “We may compress it into four weeks in January when some universities are off, doing 30 hours a week rather than 10,” thinks Anand. “And next summer would be a naturally scaled up cohort for any student in any university. We would then expect at least double the the enrollment. The cohort size for us is a critical choice. We could have ten cohorts going on simultaneously. Scaling is basically a question of how we monitor it. As we scale up, it’s a back end challenge.”

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