Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t buy that this is going to scale necessarily.

Bharat Anand: Yes, go ahead.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying, it works to a point. I don’t think it’s going to, necessarily, scale to millions of numbers – the kind of numbers with which edX is working with right now. I don’t think the model you’re talking about is going to scale at those levels because for all the factors with which you are trying to preserve quality – the price, grade, and expectation of the interaction level. I think that works like an elite conversation mode. That does not work in a mass crowd mode.

Bharat Anand: I think i disagree with that. When we think about peer conversation, obviously, you can’t have ten thousand people on the same platform asking each others questions. We’ve experimented with the right size of the cohort. Where we’ve converged to is somewhere between 300 to 500 people.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s still a small number. That’s not a scale, right.

Bharat Anand: No, but what that means is now, if we’re going to offer the course to 9,000 or 90,000 or whatever that number is, we’ll just break them up into cohorts of that size. You’re just breaking up the total number of learners into smaller-sized cohorts, but it’s still achieving larger numbers.

Sramana Mitra: Maybe, but it remains to be seen. If there’s actually some sort of a Harvard-branded diploma being handed out and if you’re charging thousands of dollars for that diploma, people will pay, but just because people will pay doesn’t mean that people will be of a certain intellectual caliber. Maybe in several thousands, that number will give you quality audiences, but if you now go into the millions, it’s not going to give you quality audiences.

Bharat Anand: Probably the way I suggest thinking about that is in terms of outcomes. Let’s say over the last 18 months, we’ve had about 5,000 to 6,000 learners go through our offerings. Right now, we have two kinds of offerings online.

One is the Fundamentals of Business program, which is a pre-MBA program. The other is a set of courses that we’re beginning to offer, which is for people who have more extensive experience in their careers.

If you think about that number, completion rates obviously matter as well. The question is how do you think about the relevant number. I could be reaching a hundred thousand people, but at difficult completion rates, we’d probably be at 5% of that. So that’s about 5,000 learners. If you reach 5,000 to 6,000 completion rates, you’re not that far off.

The second is in terms of price. This was really important for us in terms of thinking about access. One of the things we decided early on before we launched was that we would also give financial aid. For students who are currently enrolled in colleges, we partner with colleges around the world and also rely on third-party verifiable information about financial aid needs. If you can’t afford to pay the entire amount, we can actually give you financial aid.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School
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