Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: All right. I’m going to switch to my last question. Based on the trends you see on online learning, where do you see opportunities for entrepreneurs to start new companies?

Bharat Anand: Let me step back a bit. Technology is allowing us to create all sorts of new and interesting offerings. I wanted to focus a little bit on learners and their behaviours. What we’re seeing is that there are, at least, three kinds of things that individuals look for in online experiences. The first I’d probably describe as a question of relevance. It’s one thing to offer content. The content might be of terrific quality, but as a learner, I want to know why it’s relevant or important for me. That’s a question that I think is becoming increasingly important. It’s a trend that’s caused by the confluence of many things such as scarce time and greater competition.

Related to that is also greater control over how you define your career. We’re seeing vertical specialization in jobs supplemented with broader exposure to other areas. For example if I’m going into law, I know I need some business expertise. If I’m going into business, I know I need to know something about technology. All this comes back to the question of relevance, which is fundamental. The second is a behavioural trend but still a question to ask. The bar for online learning is not the lecture mode in the classroom anymore. We’re competing against everything else online. It seems like a trivial thing to say, but I think this it true for learners online. They’re looking for engaging experiences that also have high quality education.

The third is shared experiences which is this idea of connectedness. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in digital worlds, we see connectedness in all forms. In some sense, what we’re seeing is this idea that I don’t want to interact with technology per se, I want to use technology to interact with others. If we take those three ideas and think about the opportunities in the online education space, they’re pretty large.

The last two things I’ll just add, which really comes out directly from our experiences, is what I call mobile-first learning experiences. Just like I was describing digital first, when we actually think about phones, this is not just a question of porting content to the phone format. It’s actually thinking about how I create experiences that are mobile-first. I think that’s still an unsolved problem. The last is in terms of assessment. We often talk about Big Data, but this idea of somehow being able to grade unstructured qualitative data at scale is a big opportunity. Online assessments, I think, will have to go beyond multiple choice, but how do we do that in credible ways is where the opportunities lie.

Sramana Mitra: Good. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School
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