Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Reach criteria is true for all of those platforms.

Bharat Anand: That’s true for all of those platforms, and that’s what I’m coming to. Let us look at that metric and situate where we were coming from at Harvard Business School. Having a case discussion is not something that is immediately obvious that you know how to scale because you need participation from everyone. In a sense, we were approaching this saying, “We know we can run case discussions with 90 to 100 people. We don’t know if we can run this with 300 people. Before thinking about 10,000, let’s see if we can scale this to 300.” The implication of that is reach did not end up being the defining metric for us. What was really important for us was engagement.

Sramana Mitra: Just to clarify what you’re saying, what did you learn? What was the conclusion about doing case discussions with 300 to 500 people?

Bharat Anand: We were very reductionist in our approach. One of the things we were very clear about is that if we simply try and copy the case method and put it online, that’s not going to work. There’s just so many things that happen in the classroom, which are tailored, in some sense, to the residential face-to-face interaction. We said, “What is it that makes this approach of teaching and learning work so well?”

We boiled it down to three principles. One was what I call real-world problem solving. We don’t start with the theory. We actually start with the problem. That contextualises what you have to grapple with as a student. From there, we inductively drive the theory. Going in that direction as opposed to starting the other way around has big implications on how your learning sticks. That was the first idea. The second is what you might call active learning. In the classroom, everyone is on the edge of their seats. Everyone could be called to participate at any time. It’s a very lean forward mode of learning.

The third is social learning. In a discussion, you’re not just learning from the faculty member. You’re learning from what other students are saying. That peer-to-peer component becomes as important. You take those three principles and you say, “How can we create an online experience which anchors in these principles and what does the expression look like?” That’s basically the journey that we went down.

For instance, when we think about the courses and the programs that we offer at HBX, almost every lesson starts with a very short one to three minute video of some manager talking about the problem he’s facing. It’s not a faculty member starting by explaining some concept. Second is you’re then asked to solve that problem. We have what we call the three-minute rule. Roughly every three minutes, you got to be doing something on the platform. The implication is no video can be longer than three minutes.

Second implication is that after three minutes, you’re asked a question. It could be a poll. It could be reflection question about what you’ve read or heard. You fill in your answers. Right after that, you see what others have answered. This turns out to be a really important point. The answers are being updated in real-time. You can see the distribution of answers, but you can also see why any other individual has answered, which means that you’re not anonymous.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School
1 2 3 4 5 6 7