Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 2)

Bharat Anand: The third question is, frankly, just about seeing the trend out there. As you see a lot of universities and colleges create these free online courses, it’s not that hard to actually put content online. We take great pride in what we do on campus in terms of the pedagogical experience that our students get through the case method of learning.

One question we were asking is, “Is there a way we can offer something that has the DNA of Harvard Business school?” When you combine these three questions together, you can start seeing why we went in a different path. We basically do case discussions in the classroom. The idea of putting a camera and recording those, and then streaming that online is not really sensible for the online learner. When we looked at it, we said, “Case method teaching is obviously very powerful as a learning experience. Can we take the principles of case method teaching and think about how those principles express themselves in the online medium?”

We realised that we probably need a pretty different platform to pull this off from what was out there. That’s part of the reason why we actually went in a direction that led us to create our own proprietary platform with courses that had a different character.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got it. You’re saying that the principle on which edX, and related platforms like Coursera, is designed such that they record the classroom lectures and then host it on the platforms. The experience starts in the classroom and gets morphed into a digital experience. It is not necessarily designed for an online learner. It doesn’t take into account the capabilities of online learning and online course design as the starting point. Did I get that right?

Bharat Anand: Yes, but not really exploiting the digital medium for what it can do.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click into that. Talk to us about what are the specific capabilities of the digital platform that those other platforms are not taking advantage of?

Bharat Anand: Just to be clear though, what I was talking about is the first wave. We started thinking about HBX about three and a half years ago. That was the state of online education at that point. Clearly, the nature of offerings has evolved quite a bit on all these platforms. You start seeing elements of Digital First everywhere, but this is the thinking that we started with. The other point of emphasis that might be useful to just mention is that what was really exciting about offering courses to, potentially, hundreds of thousands of learners was this promise of reach—that we can reach a large number of people anywhere around the world instantaneously. Reach almost became a defining metric.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School
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