As a captain for American Airlines, former USAF pilot, and veteran, my entire career focus has been on perfecting the skills and knowledge that would make me the best pilot I could be. After upgrading to captain, I decided to make an assessment of how I fit into the larger picture of my company and how I could contribute to other areas of the operation.

The results were a wakeup call: I had a solid background in the technical aspects of my profession, but my knowledge of airline economics, American’s financial performance, and how we forecast and plan for the future was thin. I realized that if I wanted to broaden my career, I would have to step up my game and approach these areas with the same rigor as I took to flying.

But how could I find time for an MBA with a flying schedule that changes monthly and sends me to different cities across the USA, Canada, and Mexico?

Unfortunately, most of the online classes I looked into were more theoretical in nature and followed the usual format of lecture, homework, and exam. I wanted something that would be real-life, not theoretical. Being a fan of HBS’ case study method, I visited their website and learned of a new program called HBX CORe. I signed up before the ink was dry.

Finding A Work/Life Balance

My biggest challenge was trying to fit HBX into my daily schedule while balancing time with my family and the challenges of my job. As an airline pilot, I am usually away flying at least half of the month. Trips usually have erratic hours, include long duty days, and require me to cross multiple time zones, which can make studying difficult.

Using a whiteboard, I identified what pilots refer to as “threats,” or obstacles interfering with accomplishing my goal and ways around them.

Next I used a mission planning format from my USAF days and came up with a plan to fit HBX into work and family life:

• Organize & Prioritize: Identify deadlines for quizzes and writing assignments, paying particular attention to “max effort” weeks with multiple deadlines.
• Execute: Allocate “hard” study hours per day. Attempt to fly trips that keep you on a normal body clock. Put a pad between each module’s targeted completion date and the quiz deadline. Stay focused and remember there is no “freeze” button once HBX starts—the clock is always running.
• Assess your progress: Are you meeting your goals?

While I was away a lot, a big plus was our layover hotels: they’re quiet, have a stable internet connection, and offer a good desk. My big takeaway from this aspect of the course is that with the right plan, you can find the time to devote to coursework.

Adjusting to a New Way of Learning

HBX is a revolutionary approach to education and several aspects of it are definitely worth sharing with any prospective student, especially if you have been out of college several years or are well established in your career. First, it’s essential you “wrap your arms around” the inductive learning model. While I’m not an educator, many of us learned from the deductive model—which is structured around concept, examples, and application. However, in the inductive model it’s the other way around: you’re presented with examples and have to derive the concept. Since one person can’t see as many relations between examples as a group, inductive learning is supercharged when you form a team of learners.

The HBX platform’s peer-to-peer help or peer messaging features will help you build a team and better understand concepts—use it! Another important aspect of the class is to be what pilots refer to as a “good wingman.” Seek and give help freely. And don’t have thin skin—welcome honest feedback from your classmates. The end of module reflections are a great opportunity to fill in gaps in your knowledge and offer constructive comments to classmates that have a great take on a concept.

Remember: HBX is a collaborative learning experience, not a season of Survivor.

Without a doubt, HBX has exceeded my expectations for learning. The platform is easy to navigate and well organized. The video, graphics, and interactive exercises will bring life to important concepts in an unforgettable way. You’ll get to sit in the seat of analysts, managers, and accountants and solve real world problems—it’s like practicing your flying in the simulator before you go out on the line. And most importantly, it takes subjects like Business Analytics, Economics, and Accounting and presents them at the customer-product level. That’s where a business either wins or loses.

What's on the Horizon

Now that I’ve finished HBX, I am looking at a variety of ways to apply what I have learned to help make American Airlines a better company. One example is American’s Fuel Smart initiative. Created during the great fuel price spike of the last decade, this program looks at ways to save incremental amounts of fuel on every flight (consistent with safety, of course!). With over 2,500 flights each day, small savings on each flight add up to big savings over the long haul. And there is a greater good to this program as well—a portion of the savings goes to aid wounded veterans. Fuel Smart also helps reduce American’s carbon footprint, too.

Another program that interests me is the Aviation Safety Action Program, or ASAP, for short. ASAP is a safety improvement program jointly administered by the Federal Aviation Administration, American Airlines, and the Allied Pilots Association—the professional association representing our pilots. Under the ASAP program, events or conditions that affect flight safety are “self-reported” by pilots to the program. This information is analyzed and recommendations are made to improve procedures, purchase equipment or upgrades, or correct conditions that affect flight safety. By the way, ASAP is probably the biggest contributing factor to the drastic reduction in aviation accidents or incidents in recent years.

Finally, both American and the Allied Pilots Association need individuals to work on contract initiatives that are a win-win for both sides. By seeking creative contract initiatives, my company can differentiate itself from the competition and create a competitive advantage. While these programs (there are more) aren’t apparent to you as you board your flight, they allow American to operate more efficiently and deliver a safer, more reliable product to the customer at a better price.

Although Fuel Smart, ASAP, and contract negotiations are from different ends of the management spectrum, they all represent a practical use of what I learned at HBX. Statistical analysis, hypothesis testing, budget forecasting, relative cost analysis, and product differentiation are just a few areas where HBX will help me make a big contribution. And I’m sure that other adult learners that are established in a career will see similar opportunities in their fields. My recommendation: expand your horizons, you’ll be glad you did. When I was a new-hire flight engineer almost twenty-four years ago, a senior captain gave me this admonishment: leave the profession better than when you started in it. I hope to do so.

One final note: thank you to Professors Hammond, Anand, and Narayanan as well as the HBX staff for a great experience. Also thank you to my February 2015 classmates for your insight and camaraderie. 

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Want to hone your business skills to help you advance in your career and feel more confident contributing to conversations about finance, economics, and business analytics?

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Haven’t we learned by now? You simply should not lie about any numbers that appear on your financial statements. Even if you somehow manage to get away with it in the short run, the truth will eventually come out. And when it does, the implications will be far, far worse than whatever deficiency you were initially trying to cover.

Take for instance Toshiba, the 140-year-old Japanese tech giant, that recently came under fire for overstating revenues by approximately $1.2 billion over the course of five years. Since the news broke, stock prices have dropped by more than 30%, and eight of the company’s senior executives, including CEO Hisao Tanaka, have resigned.

So why didn’t Toshiba learn from other companies like Enron, Tyco, or Adelphia that have gone through similar scandals in the past? Why did they feel such pressure to overstate profits?

Toshiba CEO resigns over $1.2 billion accounting scandal: http://t.co/MEeKD1aXSo via @sophia_yan pic.twitter.com/Y7h9qTR5kB

— CNNMoney (@CNNMoney) July 21, 2015

As any basic accounting class will tell you, one of the most common ways to evaluate a company is by its profitability: stakeholders use profit margin to evaluate a company’s ability to turn sales into net income, which is important for a variety of reasons. Potential stock owners want to make sure the profit margin is high in order to receive the greatest possible dividends, while lending institutions evaluate profit margin to determine their chance of being paid back on a loan.

This logic is pretty straightforward, but what else could be making senior executives want to overstate profits? There are a plethora of reasons, but it’s important to note that more often than not, executive compensation is tied to profits.

Apart from the sheer size of the cover-up, perhaps most newsworthy aspect of the Toshiba scandal is the attention being given to overall corporate governance practices (or lack thereof) in Japan. Internal controls, external auditing, and non-biased boards are not commonly found, but it seemed like Japan was making a move in the right direction when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe established a rudimentary corporate governance code a couple of months ago. Now many are wondering if this move was a "too little, too late" situation. It will be interesting to see how the governance landscape in Japan changes as the Toshiba scandal turns more and more company stakeholders into financial detectives.

Toshiba scandal sheds harsh light on Japan's corporate governance http://t.co/RreAMF72Jv

— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) July 21, 2015

A word of caution—enhanced corporate governance has its advantages and disadvantages, and just as Toshiba should have learned from the actions of executives in the American scandals of 2001, it should also study the effects. The introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002 greatly improved governance in America, but misstatements still occur. It seems that people will always find a loophole. Additionally, some would argue that the costs of compliance have changed the landscape of business, with more companies choosing not to ‘go public’ or changing from public to private in order to avoid the expenditures.

Will Toshiba be able to recover? How will Corporate Governance evolve in Japan?

Price goes up, and demand goes down. It’s one of the most fundamental relationships in economics. If the price of a cup of coffee increases, demand for coffee, all else equal, will fall. For example, if your regular Starbucks drink order were to double in price overnight, you might reconsider indulging in your daily fix of caffeine.

But does this inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded always hold? No - and for many reasons.

Anyone who has taken Econ 101 can cite some famous exceptions to the so-called “law” of a downward-sloping demand curve. For example, demand for a luxury good, like a sports car, might actually be greater with a higher price. For some car buffs, a high price may be a signal of superior quality, and more Lamborghinis would be demanded the steeper the price tag.

On the flipside, demand for some other goods (so-called “Giffen” goods, named after Scottish economist Robert Giffen), may fall with price. When the price of a cheap commodity, such as rice, falls, the average shopper might feel just a little bit wealthier and buy the quinoa this week instead.

So that's how it works with consumer goods - but what about services? That's a trickier question and yet an even more important one to answer.

As workers throughout many cities in the U.S. and Europe continue to demand a higher minimum wage (many protestors in America are looking to double the $7.50 base wage), the question of whether the law of demand applies to labor markets is becoming increasingly important to politicians, policymakers, and businesses.

A business perspective

How can we think about this issue of higher wages from the point of view of a firm, or a manager? And what conclusions can we draw for our business?

Let’s first look at it from a purely economic perspective: In theory, a hike of the federally-required minimum wage should depress the demand for labor. If companies must pay each worker more, the law of demand predicts that they will hire fewer workers. The minimum wage sets a floor under which businesses and potential employees cannot contract, even if both sides are willing. Based on price alone, the number of jobs available to all in the labor force should theoretically fall.

If that's the case, nationwide cries for better compensation for minimum wage earners would then only benefit those employees who still have jobs after the policy change. Less-skilled workers, whose hourly output may be valued by companies at less than $15, might be laid off, and those who are already out of work may find it even harder to get a job.

Businesses are getting steamrolled on the minimum wage. Here’s why. http://t.co/pMIR2MIM67

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 25, 2015

What’s more, as technology becomes more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly more attractive for firms to switch from humans to labor substitutes such as robots, drones, and self-service machines. A construction worker or maid, whose skills are hard to imitate, may still be able to find a job at a higher minimum wage. A permanently pricier cashier or secretary with little experience might not. Increasing the costs of workers would very likely expedite the process of automation (which is already moving forward at a staggering pace).

Fewer people working and greater incentives to invest in job-stealing cyborgs... economically at least, it appears to be an inappropriate moment to be raising the price of workers.

Is it that simple?

However, as we saw in the case of goods, economics is often far from cut and dry. True, an increase in the price of labor may decrease firms’ demand for workers—but again, we must add that pesky “ceteris paribus” or “all else equal” clause to the end of any conclusion we can draw. That is, a minimum wage boost would decrease the demand for workers, assuming the policy change affects nothing else. Yet this is not often the case; other variables may matter. And these variables may matter a lot for your business.

For example, maybe an increase in wages would boost employee morale and actually increase productivity, creating more value for your company. Or maybe better-paid employees value their jobs more, and staff turnover is reduced because of the change. Any number of factors could play a role and, indeed, managers must take into account more than just the cost of a worker before deciding to hire or fire.

VIDEO: Seattle restaurant that raised minimum wage to $15 ahead of schedule reports success: http://t.co/zDCFFauNLG

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 31, 2015

The law of demand, and more generally the field of economics, is often far more nebulous than textbooks make it out to be. Will an increase in wages be beneficial to the cities and countries that are considering such a measure? It's hard to tell. But, for managers and policymakers, a basic understanding of economics can provide a useful framework for making decisions and understanding the possible impacts of such a change. 

What do you think will happen?

As a museum professional with an academic background in Art and Art History, I never focused much on business in school. My career in curation and exhibition design didn't require me to make many business decisions, so when I heard about HBX CORe last year, I applied with the vague thought that expanding my business knowledge might be useful in the future.

Well, the future came pretty quickly. Less than a year after completing CORe, I founded my own company, Rxhibition, a non-profit organization that curates, designs, and installs art exhibitions in chemotherapy treatment areas. Research has shown the positive effects that art and music have on the physical and psychological health of people undergoing chemotherapy, and we hope to encourage further research so that engaging healing environments become the new hospital norm. 

The idea came suddenly, and within two months we were incorporated, pending tax-exempt status, finalizing a deal for our pilot exhibition with a major hospital, had secured two significant sponsorships, and had reached over 1,000 supporters in 62 countries!

There is no way I could have brought Rxhibition to this point without the skills I gained from CORe. From the start, Economics for Managers proved to be immensely helpful in forming the business plan. The range of sample scenarios that were woven into the curriculum provided a great foundation for key things to look out for when building a marketing strategy as well as ways to differentiate and perform a thorough competitor analysis.

The skills I gained in Financial Accounting and Business Analytics became more important once the organization was up and running. Because we are still a small organization, I am responsible for all of our accounting and budgeting. While the HBX program is centered on for-profit business, these skills are vital in non-profit management as well. While our financial statements look slightly different, the methods of entry and forecasting procedures covered in CORe have been essential as we plan our budgets both for our own operating purposes as well as for various grant applications.

As an educator, I feel that I am somewhat at a crossroads. Being traditionally educated at a small private liberal arts college, I am a big defender of the Ivory Tower and learning simply for learning’s sake. At the same time, I sensed a disconnect between my educational experience and that of my students’ when I began teaching. Wikipedia was the norm for scholarship, and deciphering answers to big questions began with a Google search.

I am not a dinosaur myself, but I do remember my high school teachers telling my classmates stories of how they had to trudge hours in the snow to do research at the library and use “calling cards.” Having grown up in California most of my life, the idea of a library was as foreign as the idea of snow. I can’t imagine how archaic I must seem to my students.

This year marked my transition to diversify my education experience and to start the conversation about making education relevant to the youth of today. It did not take much to learn about MOOCs, edtech products, and digital schools where every student received an iPad with The Great Gatsby already installed. This research ultimately led me to CORe, and I’m happy to be one of the earlier pioneers of this platform. Branching off in this mysterious, at times for-profit, world, has drawn confusion and even anger from my colleagues in education. Can business and education co-exist?

Surprisingly, the two came to head when a colleague forwarded a part-time college counseling opportunity while I was in the middle of CORe. Initially, it would just allow me to work from home and not disrupt my ultimate plans of studying CORe, volunteering, and applying to business school this coming fall. However, during the phone interview, my now future coworker was so impressed with my education journey and how I thought about the intersection of business and education that we just had a conversation about this instead of my responsibilities. Eventually, he admitted to going “off script” and was hoping I’d consider a different role with the company. It would still be a short-contract position but instead of working from my couch in California, I would be in BEIJING!

I would still do the college counseling I originally signed up for, but I would mainly be hired as a strategy consultant doing personal projects of my own creation to grow the business, train the staff, and develop a model of ethical college counseling in China. What a great bridge to business school! Since it was a self-created position, he asked that I think about how I would handle the business side before my next interview with another member on staff.

"The business skills and concepts I learned through CORe will be invaluable in helping me assess the Chinese market, the demand and pricing of our service, and how to differentiate ourselves from our competitors."

Thinking about what I had learned in CORe along with my prior college counselor experience, I wrote out projects to tackle, including some of the concepts I learned from Professor Anand’s Economics course, like determining the customers' Willingness to Pay and how to assess the market demand and pricing for the service. I also wrote about determining the average amount of time to counsel a student and where there may be bottlenecks in the process; Professor Hammond’s Business Analytics course will play huge dividends here. Lastly, though Professor Narayanan’s tough Accounting course gives me nightmares at times, I have learned enough from it to understand the company’s financials and journal entries. The numbers would help in determining the recruiting and marketing machine. After submitting my outline, my interviewer was impressed and surprised I just called them “some notes.”

I leave for China next month and am excited to start a new adventure. While I originally took CORe mainly for personal enrichment, I hope the concepts I've learned and the education I've gotten will ultimately enrich the company. I still have a lot to learn, but CORe has given me just enough to talk the talk and walk the walk when I’m in China. I really owe it to tools like CORe that allow people anywhere in the world to learn for learning’s sake and also put it to practical use when the moment arises. Years down the line, perhaps I will be a thought leader in both education and business.

I’m writing this post on the shady terrace of my office in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. After nine months of searching I connected with my dream job in May of this year: I work as a consultant for Trickle Up, an NGO that uses the graduation model to provide a comprehensive economic development program to the poorest of the poor in West Africa. I arrived in Burkina three weeks ago to contribute to a Randomized Control Trial of Trickle Up’s program, and I’ll be living in Ouagadougou and coordinating with partner organizations in rural areas for at least the next three months.

Trickle Up participants at home with dried millet and sorghum

This is a very exciting time to be working at the intersection of impact evaluation and the graduation approach to poverty alleviation. A recent NYTimes article by Nicholas Kristof gives an overview of the fascinating and effective ways that new economic development interventions can treat poverty, and the article mentions Trickle Up’s work specifically.

Meeting a of a village savings group

Impact evaluation fieldwork requires one to be versed in diverse and numerous fields. In the coming weeks, I’ll be designing program materials in French and communicating with the headquarters office in English, moving around Ouagadougou and out to the field by motorcycle and 4X4, tracking partner activities on Excel spreadsheets, considering budgets to find cost-effective ways to implement programs, helping to produce monitoring and evaluation surveys and tools, and coordinating contracts with partner organizations.

My transport in Ouagadougou

My HBX CORe experience prepared me well for the adaptability, patience and quick thinking that this job requires. I have a much more rapid and intuitive understanding of Excel shortcuts, survey techniques, data analysis, financial incentives, asset investments and depreciation, and cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. All of these are skills that I acquired over painstaking hours of study in my basement in Boston, and can now apply to my work in Africa.

Notebook tracking contributions to the communal savings fund

I’ve been interested in pursuing an MBA for several years. I now have a much more realistic understanding of the subjects I can expect to study and the relevance of these subjects to my field of interest. I appreciate the CORe program because it was both intensive and adaptable. On our cohort’s Facebook group, I’ve seen investment bankers, computer programmers, English majors and airline pilots talk about how the concepts that they’ve studied in CORe give them insight into their chosen profession.

A program participant brewing sorghum beer to sell in markets and from her house

I would recommend this program to anyone who wants to expand on their interests and expose themselves to new subjects, with the important caveat that the work is HARD, and you only get out what you put in. Best of luck to my fellow classmates, and to all the future cohorts! Wherever you’re going, I hope this program will help get you there.

 
Dean Nitin Nohria addresses HBX CORe students at a closing ceremony on November 2, 2014.

In the fall of 2010, just a few months after I became dean of Harvard Business School, I remember hosting a large meeting where faculty and staff could ask questions and offer feedback. I recall one question in particular: "When will Harvard Business School enter the arena of online education?”

I answered unequivocally: “Not in my lifetime.”

I was wrong, of course, and thanks to the launch of EdX and a remarkably entrepreneurial group of colleagues at HBS, we began work on the project that has become HBX. This month, as we celebrate one year since its launch—during which 4,100 students from 72 countries have experienced our courses—it’s fitting for me to reflect on why I initially misjudged the potential of online education, and why I now believe the technological and pedagogical innovations being pioneered by HBX have the ability to transform the way we teach in all of our programs at Harvard Business School.

My slow acceptance of online education was shaped by two important factors.

First, until a few years ago many of the people promoting online education positioned it as a disruptive innovation which would threaten (or even kill off) campus-based, face-to-face educational programs. While it undoubtedly is shifting the landscape of management education, my belief in the transformative power of an intimate, immersive, residential program that utilizes the case study method—a form of business education created by Harvard Business School nearly a century ago—is profound and unshakeable. The pervasive framing of online education as a threat caused me to react defensively; once I changed my mindset, and began to see it as a supplement and complement to existing educational methods, my attitudes began to change.  My colleagues and I started to view it as an exciting opportunity to extend and enhance our mission rather than as a threat to our survival.

The second factor that limited my imagination was the experience I’d had sampling online courses as they existed in 2010. I had explored the first generation of MOOCs and was unimpressed. After twenty-five years of teaching via the case study method, I prefer deeply interactive classroom discussions to lectures—and uploading videotaped lectures and problem sets into an online setting seemed to me a poor alternative. But as my colleagues and I began to brainstorm how we might bring our engaging case method pedagogy into an online setting, my views changed. I sometimes use the analogy that if someone examined a mobile phone in 1985—when the contraption was the size of a small suitcase—he or she might dismiss the long-term appeal of this transformational technological innovation. Likewise, once I realized how dramatically a team of Harvard Business School faculty and staff could improve on existing methods for online education, I realized that my view had been mistaken, too.

I am enormously proud of the courses that my colleagues at HBX have created. They have found ways to replicate the intimacy and interactivity of the case study method in an online environment, and they have pushed the technology in imaginative ways (and continue to do so). I am eager to watch as they continue to innovate and expand. There is no question that they have delivered on the initial idea: that HBX could extend the mission and reach of Harvard Business School, just as our Executive Education programs and Harvard Business Publishing allow us to deliver teaching and research to thousands of people beyond those who pursue a Harvard MBA.

Our HBX CORe offerings liberate undergraduates to major in subjects of their choosing but still have access to a high-quality introduction to business fundamentals, and they allow companies to hire people without business backgrounds by ensuring new employees have the ability to quickly and efficiently learn the basics in a cost-effective manner. HBX, and HBX Live in particular, also help us to deliver on our promise of lifelong learning, by giving us new way to reach and interact with students and alumni as their careers and educational needs evolve.

Perhaps the biggest surprise that’s come out of HBX is how it is beginning to affect our thinking about the best way to teach live classes utilizing the case study method. Just as lecture-based programs are putting lectures online to “flip the classroom” and deepen in-class discussion, we are exploring ways to use the technologies and methods pioneered by HBX to allow pieces of what we now do in our case discussions to take place online before class, opening up time for a richer classroom experience.

For example, we are exploring ways to use HBX technology to enhance the way we present technical or analytically complex materials before students come to class, freeing professors from the whiteboard and allowing students to master these concepts at a pace that is personally comfortable. In Executive Education, HBX Live has already been put to use in modular programs when participants are not in residence and are distributed all over the globe.

I can’t—and won’t—predict what HBX might look like in the future. I have humility, because I was wrong about online education in the past, and I don’t want to be wrong again. But I have no doubt HBX will continue to be a powerful new vehicle for us to advance our mission of educating leaders who make a difference in the world, and at all stages of their lives.

Five years after I said “not in my lifetime,” I now believe that HBX could easily be one of the most important initiatives we undertake at Harvard Business School.

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This post is a part of our HBX Year One series celebrating the one year anniversary of the public launch of HBX. View all of our HBX Year One posts here. 

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This map shows the geographic distribution of CORe learners for our June 2015 cohort

We are used to creating and launching new educational programs at Harvard Business School. After all, we’ve been doing it for over one hundred years. Yet, when we launched HBX one year ago it was new for us in three respects. First, the courses we offered (HBX CORe, our “fundamentals of business” program, and Disruptive Strategy) were entirely online – something we’d never done before. Second, HBX CORe was offered to a set of learners – undergraduates and non-business graduate students – who we had never served before. Third, the courses were offered on a platform that was entirely new and built from scratch for this purpose.  

We’ve never really had to reinvent all three attributes - a new group of learners, a new “classroom” infrastructure, and a new medium – for a program before. And that’s why we approached the launch of HBX with great excitement, but also great humility.  

Some Highlights from Year One

There are several moments that I personally remember well from our first year at HBX. There was the day we opened our website for applications – and wondered whether anyone would sign up for a paid online program on a platform they’d never seen or heard of before. There was the activity on the first day that we launched CORe (June 11, 2014), when over 300 participants uploaded their profile pictures and information, generating over 13,000 profile views. (It turns out that they really just wanted to check each other out).  There was the end of that first day when, at around 9 pm, we noticed that one learner - a Harvard biology major - had, incredibly, completed the first module for all three CORe courses. At around the same time, she reached out with an email to us, describing the reason behind her marathon stretch on the platform that day: “it is so hard to tear myself away from the modules”, she wrote. “Thank you for creating such an amazing experience.” That was probably the first moment we felt that HBX might actually work.  

Finally, there’ve been the results so far: 85% completion rates for our courses. Engagement scores for our online courses that are similar what we experience in many of our residential programs. What we’ve learnt is not just that online engagement can be very high. Many of these online experiences are now translating, remarkably, into offline ones. Students are organizing meet-ups in different cities. They are forming study groups. Some are looking to collaborate with peers on new ventures. They are getting to know each other in ways we had hoped for, but could not envision.  

These experiences have made something else clear to us that we did not believe three years ago: learning through the online medium is surely not destined to be an inferior experience to the classroom medium. The combination of technology and creative pedagogy can spawn remarkable engagement and experiences there too.  

This is an excerpt from HBX Faculty Chair Bharat Anand's HBX Year One Reflections. 

Here are some additional highlights from our first year of HBX CORe...

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This post is a part of our HBX Year One series celebrating the one year anniversary of the public launch of HBX. Don't miss our other infographics on HBX, Courses, and Live! 

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Photo courtesy of StarPilot Productions LLC

We are used to creating and launching new educational programs at Harvard Business School. After all, we’ve been doing it for over one hundred years. Yet, when we launched HBX one year ago it was new for us in three respects. First, the courses we offered (HBX CORe, our “fundamentals of business” program, and Disruptive Strategy) were entirely online – something we’d never done before. Second, HBX CORe was offered to a set of learners – undergraduates and non-business graduate students – who we had never served before. Third, the courses were offered on a platform that was entirely new and built from scratch for this purpose.  

We’ve never really had to reinvent all three attributes - a new group of learners, a new “classroom” infrastructure, and a new medium – for a program before. And that’s why we approached the launch of HBX with great excitement, but also great humility.  

The HBX journey itself started even before that - nearly three years ago. Online education was not familiar to us then. It is also fair to say that it was not something most of us felt would seriously impact, or disrupt, our campus programs anytime soon. Yet, we decided to embark on this journey.  

We did so because of the possibilities; because we were passionate about trying to re-imagine participant-based learning online; and because of our mission - to train and educate leaders who make a difference in the world.

Creating The HBX Learning Model 

Education is a right. Great education is a privilege that many of us have benefited from in our lives. There were a few simple observations that shaped our efforts at HBX to create a great educational experience online. We believe that education – in any form – can and should be engaging and interactive. That’s the best way to challenge one’s assumptions and beliefs, to learn new and unfamiliar material, and to force one to think. We also believe that education is a social experience, not just an individual one. It’s an experience where we learn with and from others, from teachers and, as importantly, from our peers.  

This map shows the geographic distribution of CORe learners for our June 2015 cohort

Those beliefs led us to create an online platform for HBX with many idiosyncratic features. A global map – so that learners could see who else was online. Shared reflections – so they could read how others were processing the same material. Peer help – so they could ask, or answer, questions of others. Real-time updating. Drag and drop exercises. Interactive games. Online cold calls. And many more features. One important rule of thumb we followed was that a learner shouldn’t go by for more than three to five minutes without “doing something” on the platform.  

To create the courses, we borrowed from a teaching approach that we know best: the case method. This was the inspiration for the three principles - storytelling, interactive learning, and social learning – that anchored HBX.  

But while we were borrowing, we also tried, equally hard, to forget what makes our classroom approach work so well. We knew that if we tried to simply reproduce our classroom approach online, we would miss the mark. This was the basis for the “digital-first” philosophy at HBX that has come to define everything we do here. It’s not an idea that we invented. It’s one that we took learnt from the recent history of sectors like media and entertainment, where companies have been trying to digitally transform themselves (and often struggled).  Digital-first is a simple idea - leverage the digital medium for what it is, rather than merely trying to transfer a traditional format online. But it’s one that’s often gone unheeded in online education.  

A Team Effort

Our early conversations involved a handful of HBS faculty and staff. An initiative like HBX, however, doesn’t get created without the incredible efforts of many: our Dean, the rest of the founding faculty team (Jan Hammond, Youngme Moon, VG Narayanan, and Clay Christensen), and our staff team – some drawn from HBS, and several others who simply shared our passion for contributing to something meaningful and creative.  

Finally, there are the HBX learners: more than 4,000 of them in year one for HBX CORe, coming from over 450 universities, and 72 countries; over a dozen cohorts of learners for Disruptive Strategy. The group of learners has been incredibly diverse. (To quote one learner’s description, “their path to HBX is something you would usually find in a Tom Hanks movie”). They’ve been humorous, they’ve been grateful. They’ve given generous feedback, which has been invaluable as we continue to refine and innovate on everything we do. They have brought engagement, passion, and a remarkable sense of collaboration to the HBX learning experience in a way we never imagined. They’ve been pioneers as well in our online journey. We owe a deep gratitude to all of them.  

Some Highlights from Year One

There are several moments that I personally remember well from our first year at HBX. There was the day we opened our website for applications – and wondered whether anyone would sign up for a paid online program on a platform they’d never seen or heard of before. There was the activity on the first day that we launched CORe (June 11, 2014), when over 300 participants uploaded their profile pictures and information, generating over 13,000 profile views. (It turns out that they really just wanted to check each other out).  There was the end of that first day when, at around 9 pm, we noticed that one learner - a Harvard biology major - had, incredibly, completed the first module for all three CORe courses. At around the same time, she reached out with an email to us, describing the reason behind her marathon stretch on the platform that day: “it is so hard to tear myself away from the modules”, she wrote. “Thank you for creating such an amazing experience.” That was probably the first moment we felt that HBX might actually work.  

Finally, there’ve been the results so far: 85% completion rates for our courses. Engagement scores for our online courses that are similar what we experience in many of our residential programs. What we’ve learnt is not just that online engagement can be very high. Many of these online experiences are now translating, remarkably, into offline ones. Students are organizing meet-ups in different cities. They are forming study groups. Some are looking to collaborate with peers on new ventures. They are getting to know each other in ways we had hoped for, but could not envision.  

These experiences have made something else clear to us that we did not believe three years ago: learning through the online medium is surely not destined to be an inferior experience to the classroom medium. The combination of technology and creative pedagogy can spawn remarkable engagement and experiences there too.  

Starting A Journey

This fall, for the first time, more than 300 of our matriculating MBA students will have experienced learning through HBX before they arrive on campus. A month ago, for the first time, some of our alumni experienced HBX Live, our innovative studio that enables case discussions at a distance. We are looking to integrate HBX offerings and platforms into our existing executive education programs, and into our traditional channels for disseminating research. Our faculty colleagues are creating new courses. Our alumni are eager to see what we are doing with technology in rethinking teaching and learning. It’s only been a year, but it’s clear that the impact of these efforts on our own campus will grow over time.  

This probably shouldn’t have been surprising to any of us. Technology, after all, is just an enabler. It’s a means, not an end. And what we’ve learnt so far is that it can be a powerful enabler of learning, of teaching, and of research – indeed, of nearly everything we do in a university.  

Year one of HBX has been a real roller-coaster ride. The astonishing, and sobering, part of it all is that we are probably far closer to the starting point than the finish line in the story of how technology might revolutionize education.  

We hope that our efforts at HBX will ultimately transform the educational experience of everyone who comes to our campus to learn. We also hope that our efforts can touch and impact new learners around the world who might never set foot on our campus. More than anything, we hope that the educational experiences we are delivering through HBX impacts learners not just through the content being offered there, but by serving as a springboard for new ideas, creative solutions, and better things – a springboard that enables our learners to make a difference in the world.

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This post is a part of our HBX Year One series celebrating the one year anniversary of the public launch of HBX. View all of our HBX Year One posts here. 

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