Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some of the other trends that you see in this mode of delivering education. Are there international students who are just doing the certification and has nothing to do with applying for the full program?

Patrick Mullane: Yes, for sure. Let me be clear. The number of people who use it explicitly to apply to the Harvard MBA program is exceptionally small. Of that 37,000, I’d be shocked if 500 of them took it for that purpose. Most people are not taking it for that reason. They’re taking it either because they want to apply to some other school or they have some other business needs.

To your point, 40% of our participants are international students so we have a very strong international presence with our programs. Most of them use it for similar reasons that the American students do. Either they’re applying to graduate programs in some other country, or they have no inclination to apply to graduate programs. They just want the learnings.

Sramana Mitra: What other trends do you see in the behavior?

Patrick Mullane: It’s interesting. We see some trends with respect to the courses that seem to have more appeal based on the topic. Clay Christensen has a course on disruptive innovation that tends to be quite popular. It’s partly because he’s written about it. I think partly because there’s no part of the business world where his thoughts on innovation aren’t relevant.

Most entrepreneurs are trying to be disruptors in some way. It’s really relevant to established companies because they’re looking for ways to be innovative internally and to make sure that they’re not getting snuck up on by the entrepreneur in the garage. He has built a reputation as somebody who has theories that are applicable in day-to-day life. We tend to see a lot of popularity in other areas where I wouldn’t necessarily have expected. Accounting is popular. It’s applicable across all industries and all company sizes that you’re going to need to know something about accounting.

I was in a startup when I came out of business school. They expect you to be able to talk intelligently about projections, balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. Those things are very useful across the board. Then, there are a few niche ones. We have a relatively new course on what we call Sustainable Business Strategies, which is about how companies can do well for themselves by doing good for the world. That’s probably not too surprising given the trends in that market. I’d say there have been interesting trends in the topics.

We have been surprised over the life of HBX on the extent to which the students say that the online case method along with the social tools we built into our platform makes them feel connected to their fellow participants. Another reason for that is we’re not an on-demand system. When you sign up for one of our courses, you have a particular start date. You have an end date. You’re going through it together with a cohort. That was intentional because the cohort experience on the campus can become powerful with students helping each other.

The idea is you get that in a cohort that you wouldn’t get on demand. We seem to have done a good job of solving that problem with getting engagement at scale and doing it without live faculty interaction on most of our courses. I think that’s the trend generally. People are getting more comfortable that you can make those connections online.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know how much you know about our program. We do everything online. We do everything with case studies and video lectures.

Patrick Mullane: You find it effective?

Sramana Mitra: Incredibly effective. We know what are the questions that early-stage technology entrepreneurs ask. We have modules and case studies addressing every one of those. If somebody in the program has a question, they will find the module instead of having somebody respond to those questions and train them on those particular topics over and over again. They just go there and spend half an hour listening to the video lecture and reading the case studies.

Patrick Mullane: I often say that learning by case study is one of the only ways to effectively teach online. So many people have learned to consume content online often in a way that includes entertainment. Not that business cases are meant to be entertainment, but they are engaging because it’s easier to put yourself in the shoes of somebody and think through a problem than being lectured to. I actually think the case method is ahead of its time when it comes to being effective in helping people learn in an online environment.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX
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