HBS Online
Background
HBS Online is an EdTech startup situated smack in the middle of the world’s premier business school. The initiative started as a way for incoming MBA students with a less defined quantitative background to catch up on some key curriculum before starting at HBS in the fall. Since then, HBS Online has grown to over a dozen online classes, including the original Credential of Readiness (CORe).
My role:
Program Delivery:
As part of the program services team, I was responsible for successfully delivering the CORe course to each incoming group of participants from start (hand off from marketing and admissions) to finish (successful completion and introduction into “alumni” community.
Communications workflows:
I managed in program communications for all participants taking CORe, including juggling up to four or five separate cohorts (all at different points in the course) at one time. I updated templates with improved copy and introduced efficiencies and automations where possible.
Community Engagement:
I also headed up several participant Facebook groups, which served as a source of community for each group of participants taking CORe. I was each cohort’s biggest cheerleader – and, when necessary, school principal.
Marketing Support:
While my role sat on the client side, I cultivated a successful cross-functional collaboration with the marketing department, namely leveraging my community engagement role to spot and highlight compelling user generated content – for example, inspiring participant stories to be highlighted on the HBS online website, blog, and in promotional materials.
Case Study: building a better on-boarding experience
Pain Point:
The HBS Online learning experience is not your average digital course experience. No watching pre-recorded lectures from college campuses. HBS Online mirrors Harvard Business School’s own famous case study learning method, meaning learning is both fundamentally inductive and social, and participants actually take an in-person exam to determine their success in the program. For these reasons, the experience and platform require a bit of framing for new participants.
When I first joined HBS Online, participants were bombarded with an onslaught of information in the first weeks of the program. Admittedly, there was a lot of ground to cover – everything from community norms for both on and off platform communications, grading rubrics, plagiarism and cheating guidelines, account setup, and first assignments.
We knew that a lengthy email format was not the right way to communicate this information, as it was some of the most important we’d deliver throughout the program.
What’s more, we noticed that the first few weeks of a new program launch were bogged down by high numbers of customer support tickets and Facebook group messages asking for help with easily answered questions, creating operational inefficiencies and redundant work.
There had to be a better way.
How I helped:
An instructional designer and I decided to team up and tackle this problem head on. Taking inspiration from the course’s own pedagogy, we thought it would be best to show rather than tell where this early, crucial information was concerned.
We created an interactive, introductory module (highlighted above) that every participant would be expected to complete before starting the course. In it, we used the very learning methods and platform components the participants would encounter every day throughout the program. In this way, we were able to both familiarize participants with the platform while simultaneously communicating crucial information about plagiarism and originality, community norms, and course deadlines.
Outcomes:
Support tickets and Facebook group support requests reduced.
Incidences of plagiarism also decreased.
Almost 100% completion rate of test introductory module before it became mandatory.