Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 4)

Bharat Anand: For this to work, we actually need to become comfortable knowing who else is on the platform. We have real profiles and not anonymous IDs. In terms of making it active, we have all kinds of interactive exercises. We also introduced a feature which we copied directly from the classroom, which is what we call the cold call. In the physical classroom, I could call any student and just say, “Sramana, what do you think?” Those moments are often huge learning moments for the students because, for one, they’re forced to think on their feet, sometimes terrified. They get to learn from mistakes. It’s not so much that you get the answer right. Then we take the discussion from there.

They also actually know that their peers are watching them. We have the HBX online cold call where you’re going through the course and suddenly at random, a popup might appear saying, “Sramana, you’ve been cold-called. You have a minute to answer the question.” There’s a clock ticking in the corner and your answer is visible to everyone in the cohort once you finish. That just introduces this element of keeping you active. Students tell us that they’re as terrified of the online cold call as the physical cold call. Those are just some examples of features we introduced to think about what active learning means.

The last part is actually very interesting when we get to social learning. There, the problem you’re trying to solve is actually a problem that is pretty hard. How do we get students to interact with each other in real-time? Who actually answers questions that students have? This is a real problem in almost every educational setting. If we’re going to try and make these offerings scale, we can’t have faculty or content experts monitoring the discussion boards every single second. This is where, in some sense, the peer-to-peer learning becomes really important.

As I said, we started out with real profiles. When you get into the platform, the first thing you see is who else is out there. It’s almost like a global map with pulsating bubbles about who’s active anywhere in the world. These are real profiles, so you get to know each other. When we have reflections, they often share reflections. After you fill in your answers, you are shown the answers of everyone else. You can click on those reflections. You can engage in one-to-one messaging.

Then one question that we were trying to think about was, “How do we get people to answer each other’s questions? The design challenge, in a sense, is what we see on normal online discussion boards. These are data that my colleague at HarvardX, Andrew Ho, has given me. Typically, about 5% to 10% of learners actually participate in online discussion boards. If you ask the question why, it probably comes back to a few things. Oftentimes, these discussion sites are not easily searchable. Secondly, it’s not clear that I have really any strong incentive to participate there. Third, particularly in some courses, you have quite a few content experts online who, if you ask a question, they might jump in with an answer. That, effectively, substitutes for me having to answer anyone else’s question.

We approached this slightly differently. The first thing we did was give students incentives. We said, “The extent to which you answer other people’s questions is tied to your grade.” The second thing is a subtle design choice. We made the discussion board, in effect, local to every single page. When you go through the HBX course, you have to go through it in a sequential fashion. You can’t jump around. The content is offered on different pages. There’s a unique discussion board for every page, which means that if I enter that discussion board, I know that the content is going to be exactly relevant to the page of concepts that I’ve just read. It becomes easier to search and go back as well.

The third thing is this idea of trust. It’s very hard to be able to answer other people’s questions or engage in conversation if they don’t know each other. This is where the profiles come in. We’ve created a closed Facebook group for people to interact on. They start sharing their experiences. That makes them more comfortable to go on the platform and answer. What we saw very early on was that participation rate was about 75% to 80%, which was fantastic. However, it still doesn’t solve the problem of, “How do we know that these answers are going to be accurate?”

This was, honestly, one of the huge bets that we were making. We had content experts lined up ready to jump in if discussion threads went off in the wrong direction. During the first few weeks, the number of times that our content teams had to jump in was exactly zero. Almost every question being asked by the students was being correctly answered by their peers, many of whom are taking these courses for the first time. Its a very sobering, and frankly humbling, observation about the power of crowds – crowds that have been selected.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School
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