Harvard to Offer “Innovating in Health Care” MOOC
Harvard Business School has announced that its first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), “Innovating in Health Care”, will begin on March 31. The course will be available on Harvard University’s online learning platform, HarvardX, and it will last for 11 weeks.
“Innovating in Health Care” will be the first class on HarvardX to be taught by a dedicated business school instructor. The instructor for the course is Regina Herzlinger, a professor of business administration who has taught students about innovation and health care at Harvard for 43 years. Herzlinger was also the first female professor at Harvard Business School to be tenured and chaired.
In an interview with Businessweek, Herzlinger observed: “Didactic courses are very adaptable to the Web. I teach accounting as well, and there’s always a right answer. Those courses are easy. Innovation is much more challenging because it has to be interactive and team-based.”
Herzlinger’s main goal is to spur interaction, collaboration, and networking amongst students, but the online format of “Innovating in Health Care” makes her goal challenging. Students will be scattered across the globe instead interacting face to face in a classroom. However, Herzlinger has a plan. She collaborated with Svetlana Dostenko to integrate Project Lever into the course’s edX platform. Students will be able to find classmates with similar interests using Project Lever, which traditionally matches students and businesses with resources tailored to their interests.
Team-based learning within the course is also intended to reduce the attrition rate of online students. In a study of course participation, HarvardX and MITX found that 95 percent of online students dropped out of MOOCs before earning the completion certificate for them. Herzlinger hopes that the team-based component of “Innovating in Health Care” will keep students more connected and committed to their classmates and the class itself, increasing the percentage of students who complete the course.
Herzlinger observes that there are benefits and drawbacks to online learning. ““We’ve done everything we can to encourage collaboration and foster interaction online. The drawback is that you can’t have the kind of personal interaction that $50,000 to $60,000 a year will buy you. But you also don’t need to leave your job and come to campus and make a huge financial sacrifice.”
Ten thousand students have already registered for “Innovating in Health Care”. The course will provide valuable information for the organizers of HBX, an online effort developed by Harvard Business School that is expected to launch this spring.
