Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on that selection process? If it’s an open crowd, this is not going to happen. Unless there’s some sort of a screening criteria that selects a group of people of a certain intellectual level, background, etc, I don’t think you will get that. What is happening in the selection process?

Bharat Anand: Selection is actually happening on three different levels. It’s not just the admission selection that you’re referring to. Clearly, that’s one bit of it. This is online so we have the luxury of being a little more flexible in terms of how we think about who qualifies for taking the course versus a residential classroom where there’s a real hard constraint. If you take in one person, it comes at the expense of taking in another person. In online learning, in some sense, there’s no capacity constraint so we can afford to be flexible.

I don’t think the admissions selection is what actually drives this necessarily. I think there are two other things. One, which we’ve probably learned about over the last several years, is price. You’re offering these courses for a fee. It actually is a selection mechanism as well which is, “If I’m going to spend $1,500 for a program, that implicitly is indicating some kind of commitment or motivation that I have.”

The third is this idea of tying to the outcomes, which is grades. As you are well aware, we know that they can go off in one of two directions. You can get better and better quality conversations going. Two is it can actually disintegrate to the lowest common denominator. This idea is actually having a carrot and a stick. The stick is if you violate the discussion norms online, that could have implications on your grade. That ends up being a non-trivial motivator.

If you put these things together, I think it adds up to something, which is quite powerful online and, frankly, allows you to start thinking about scaling these offerings in a way that has been a real challenge for online education. What do I mean by that? We typically see two extremes of offerings. One is we offer courses to hundreds of thousands of people. We can do that at a relatively low cost. The trade-off is around selection, continuity of the students through the cohort. It’s around being able to actually offer high-value expertise. You can’t do that with a hundred thousand people simultaneously.

On the flip side, we also see online courses where the class size is 10 or 30. That’s comparable to our physical classroom. These are highly engaging experiences and have close interaction with the faculty. The challenge kicks in if it scales. The question is can you create something which not only has this highly engaging experience, but which also scales and has a relatively low cost to scale. That’s a big challenge. That’s where an instrument like this around crowdsourcing and peer conversations and peer answers is really powerful. We can’t afford to have our faculty monitoring the discussion boards every minute of every day because all of us have residential teaching responsibilities. If we had to rely on that as a way to answer student questions, these offerings would never scale.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School
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