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.

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. 

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...

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! 

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.

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. 

There is another aspect of HBX that we haven't shared much about yet.  For the last two years, a small team of faculty, staff and technology experts has been working to create an incredible new space: HBX Live, a virtual classroom that connects 60 students from anywhere in the world to a professor in Boston for a dynamic and engaging HBS-style discussion. 

How does it work?  Participants from around the globe can log in and join real-time, case-based sessions with HBS faculty, who teach from the HBX Live studio on the Boston campus of public broadcaster, WGBH.  In the studio, high resolution monitors are arrayed to mimic the tiers of an HBS classroom.  Sessions are expertly “produced” using still and roaming cameras—so realistically that we have had participants break out in a sweat as they experience a professor moving toward them for a cold call.  

The HBX Live team was thrilled to see their hard work come together as people remotely connected to the first beta session last year. "It was really powerful to see participants dialed in from different time zones and countries at the same time, and faculty noted that the experience was even more immersive than teaching in a traditional classroom," said Cristina de la Cierva, HBX Live Product Manager. "We immediately saw the impact of this new platform and are excited for all that is to come!"

The team spent most of the past year conducting additional beta sessions, refining the production model and calibrating the technology. For Ross Pearo, Director of HBX CORe, a highlight was watching the first cohort of CORe students participate in a Live session last year and interact in real-time. "It was amazing to see all these people who had only met the CORe faculty through the CORe platform having the chance to interact with them in person on HBX Live," he said. "The engagement of all the participants was really incredible to watch."

We also welcomed groups of Executive Education participants and Harvard Business School alumni from the classes of 2000, 2005, and 2010 into the studio this year. So far, feedback has been very positive overall and we look forward to rolling out more broadly to alumni and Executive Education, as well as exploring new uses altogether with HBX Live.  

Here are some highlights (and a few factoids about HBX Live)...

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, CORe, and Courses! 

Photo courtesy of StarPilot Productions LLC

Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (BSSE), based on the teachings of Clayton M. Christensen, is one of the most popular courses at Harvard Business School. The HBX team was thrilled to work with Clay to develop an online version of his course, Disruptive Strategy with Clayton Christensen, as the first offering from HBX Courses. 

Since launching in June 2014, organizational teams from more than 25 companies have taken the course and used it to help solve their most difficult strategic challenges. 

Initially, Willy Shih and Chet Huber, who teach BSSE with Clay and helped develop Disruptive Strategy, wondered whether HBX could replicate the live, interactive HBS classroom experience in an online platform. 

"I have been amazed at how well it seems to work," said Huber. "While I’m not sure anything can beat a live discussion, the combination of mini-lectures, video cases and interactive sessions do a great job – and have some unique advantages. Tailoring the material to a firm’s unique situation, and engaging each student individually (including cold calls) is something I wish I could do with 90 students in a classroom."

"The thing that shocked me on Disruptive Strategy was the idea that the HBX product had the potential to be BETTER than the classroom product," Shih added.  "It’s a comprehensive, scalable way to simultaneously bring our BSSE material to life for an entire organization, mapped across their unique competitive situation."

For John Woodson, Assistant Director of Disruptive Strategy, the response from early participants has been a huge motivator. "I heard from a recent participant that Disruptive Strategy was one of the top three executive education programs he has ever been apart of," he said. "The impact the course is having on organizations like athenahealth and Intuit has been rewarding to see." 

The range of companies that were able to benefit from the program in the first year shows the potential for HBX to reach a wider audience and allow more organizations to put Clay's theories into practice. 

“I put [my content] on the HBX platform because if I don’t do that, then every year at maximum 900 people will be exposed to the theories," Christensen said. "...and many more people need to have access.” 

Here are some of the highlights from the first year of HBX Courses:

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, CORe, and Live!