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. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ron Olsen, CEO of Remote Learner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Any other trends that you want to highlight?

Ron Olsen: What we’re seeing from our clients is really a stronger push towards the user experience and identifying this learning solution as ours. Particularly in the corporate space, how do our training and learning solutions directly tie in to our own brand? How do we make it easy and accessible for our folks? We have a fair amount of clients where we’re building near-custom applications around the needs of specific companies and their training needs. We’re seeing a straight grab-it-off-the-shelf, and the deploy it approach just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Sramana Mitra: In the portfolio of clients that you’re serving and the kinds of scenarios that you’re discovering where you need solutions to, are there specific tools and technologies that you see the need for that is not in the market that you would encourage entrepreneurs to develop? >>>

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.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ron Olsen, CEO of Remote Learner (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you give us an example of some of these additional technologies beyond Learning Management Systems that are coming into play in that context?

Ron Olsen: Some of it is technology-based and some of it is services-based. From a technology standpoint, it’s not just enough to have a Learning Management System, but the reporting and analytics are one of the big buzzwords over the last couple of years with respect to really getting a deeper understanding of what’s going on with your learners. In the corporate space for example, being able to report compliance and demonstrate success of delivering the learning has been critical. There’s a big push right now on the analytics side.

How can you take the data that’s being gathered within a learning management system about specific user activities? How often are they on the system? How much do they participate in discussion forums? What level of understanding do they have about what they’re talking about in those forums, and how to translate that and help educators really understand that true learning is happening, and not necessarily just simply check-a-box assignment? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 4)

Bharat Anand: For this to work, we actually need to become comfortable knowing who else is on the platform. We have real profiles and not anonymous IDs. In terms of making it active, we have all kinds of interactive exercises. We also introduced a feature which we copied directly from the classroom, which is what we call the cold call. In the physical classroom, I could call any student and just say, “Sramana, what do you think?” Those moments are often huge learning moments for the students because, for one, they’re forced to think on their feet, sometimes terrified. They get to learn from mistakes. It’s not so much that you get the answer right. Then we take the discussion from there.

They also actually know that their peers are watching them. We have the HBX online cold call where you’re going through the course and suddenly at random, a popup might appear saying, “Sramana, you’ve been cold-called. You have a minute to answer the question.” There’s a clock ticking in the corner and your answer is visible to everyone in the cohort once you finish. That just introduces this element of keeping you active. Students tell us that they’re as terrified of the online cold call as the physical cold call. Those are just some examples of features we introduced to think about what active learning means. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ron Olsen, CEO of Remote Learner (Part 1)

What kinds of technologies are missing from the portfolios of learning management systems that customers looking to launch online learning programs need? This is the subject of my conversation with Ron Olsen.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background about yourself as well as Remote Learner.

Ron Olsen: I’m the CEO of Remote Learner. Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve worked in a wide variety of industries and businesses. I’ve actually worked in the venture capital industry directly with a couple of VCs back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In general, I find myself having a deep appreciation for anybody who has actually started their own business regardless of how it got funded. I’ve actually started a few service-based companies myself.

In terms of my background, I’ve always had a passion for education and I taught entrepreneurship. I’m on the Board of an education-focused non-profit here in Colorado. When an opportunity to get involved with Remote Learner came up, it seemed to be a good blend of taking a company that has been around for a little while and growing it in new directions in an area which I’m passionate about.

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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? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 2)

Bharat Anand: The third question is, frankly, just about seeing the trend out there. As you see a lot of universities and colleges create these free online courses, it’s not that hard to actually put content online. We take great pride in what we do on campus in terms of the pedagogical experience that our students get through the case method of learning.

One question we were asking is, “Is there a way we can offer something that has the DNA of Harvard Business school?” When you combine these three questions together, you can start seeing why we went in a different path. We basically do case discussions in the classroom. The idea of putting a camera and recording those, and then streaming that online is not really sensible for the online learner. When we looked at it, we said, “Case method teaching is obviously very powerful as a learning experience. Can we take the principles of case method teaching and think about how those principles express themselves in the online medium?” >>>