US Business School Briefing: September 2 2015

Recreating the ‘magic’ of Harvard Business School’s classroom

Harvard Business School (HBS) has formally launched a virtual classroom that will supplement its online learning resources.

HBX Live seeks to replicate the interactions enjoyed by Harvard Business School’s on-campus students when they tackle the school’s famous case study method - in a setting that invites comparisons to a TV news studio.

Participants are beamed in from wherever they are in the world onto a video wall that can display up to 60 participants on individual screens in the Boston-based nerve center. From this studio, an HBS faculty member leads the class discussion. The idea is for participants to be able to see both the professor and their fellow students during the class, as they would in a campus environment and the studio uses moving cameras to this end. 

“Everything in the HBX Live Studio was designed to recreate the magic of the Harvard Business School case method classroom,” said Youngme Moon, professor and senior associate dean for strategy and innovation at HBS.

The studio has already been trialed on selected executive education classes, as well as alumni, and is said to have received positive feedback from its participants. The school also says that 20 faculty members are already working with the new facilities and technology.

“HBX Live will help us deliver on our promise of lifelong learning by giving us a new way to engage students and alumni—not just here in Boston, but around the globe,” said Nitin Nohria, HBS’s dean.

• Read about the launch of HBX’s first online learning course

Wharton adds analytics to its online learning portfolio

The Wharton School has announced the launch of a new online certificate course that will focus on big data. The school has also teamed up with Yahoo! to help showcase data’s practical applications to business.

‘Business Analytics’ is to be a specialization offered through the online learning platform, Coursera, and consists of four courses that deal, in turn, with customer, operations, people and accounting analytics. As with Wharton’s previous ‘Business Foundation’ series, the specialization extends to an applied-learning project in which participants grapple with a real-world challenge, for which Yahoo! has been announced as a partner.

A Wharton certificate is on offer to those who complete the full specialization. Each of the four courses will set participants back US$95 apiece, while the project is available for a further US$215, meaning that the total enrollment price weighs in at US$595.    

Anne Trumbore, director of Wharton Online said, in a press release, that it was “critical” for business managers to understand data, adding that the aim of the school’s new offering was “to reach learners worldwide who want to speak the language of analytics.”

• Read a Wharton professor’s thoughts on ‘SuperText’, the technology behind many online learning platforms and MOOCs

Tuck School adds overseas requirement 

Starting with this year’s entering class of 2017, all students at Dartmouth College’sTuck School of Business will have a take one course outside the US, according to Tuck’s new dean, Matthew Slaughter.

“What we do in the Tuck community is terrific, but we want you to have an opportunity to make the Tuck experience even more dynamic, to make this lovely campus more of a base camp from which to stretch and challenge yourself in different directions,” Slaughter said in an interview with the Valley News.

The move forms part of Slaughter’s stated desire to “reexamine the purpose and goals of Tuck” in light of the changing dynamics of the business world and, in particular, the rising demand seen in emerging markets for management education.

The compulsory overseas element is known as the TuckGO global immersion requirement, and can be met through the Tuck School’s first-year core project, via second-year elective courses or through an exchange program that see students spend a semester at a partner institution overseas. 

Promoting startup culture in Europe

Some researchers at the Tuck School’s Center for Digital Strategies have certainly been immersing themselves in the working realities of overseas markets, by collaborating on a five-point plan to foster a competitive high-tech startup culture in Europe.

Included among these five points are calls for less stringent regulation of what is described as an ‘underdeveloped’ European venture capital industry, and ensuring that the kind of international talent necessary to sustain a thriving startup culture is welcomed into and between European nations. There is also a recommendation that business schools and universities provide greater encouragement to startup founders, as a means of strengthening institutions’ potential to produce and unleash risk-takers into the business world. 

• Read about the relationship of risk to startup culture

The five points are fully outlined in ‘The Revaluation of Risk-Taking’, which saw Tuck School researchers working with peers at the University of St. Gallen and ETH Zurich, including operations management professor, Dr Elgar Fleisch.

“Innovations require the courage of entrepreneurial freedom,” Fleisch said in a press release for St. Gallen.