Share Podcast
Bringing the Case Method Online
In this special episode of Cold Call, Brian Kenny speaks with Harvard Business School professor Srikant Datar about how Harvard Business School brought...
- Subscribe:
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
- RSS
Listen and subscribe to this podcast via Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | RSS
In this special episode of Cold Call, Brian Kenny speaks with Harvard Business School professor Srikant Datar about how Harvard Business School brought 1,800 MBA students and 200 faculty online in under two weeks amid the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the challenges of scaling under pressure to maintain the highest level of participant-centered learning possible, the lessons learned, and how this crisis may change the way we teach and learn forever. For more resources on moving your classroom online, visit https://hbsp.harvard.edu/teaching-online-resources/.
HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.
BRIAN KENNY: Today we bring you a special edition of Cold Call, dedicated to the untold numbers of faculty and students in MBA programs around the world who, thanks to the coronavirus, suddenly find themselves flushed from their terrestrial classrooms and thrust into the virtual realm. We know that many of you are figuring out how to teach and learn in new ways. You’ve sent us your questions and they’re great questions. Today we’re fortunate to have a guest who has helped to lead Harvard Business School’s move into the online environment. Srikant Datar is senior associate dean for University Affairs at Harvard. He has played many leadership roles at Harvard Business School, but for the past three weeks, maybe three and a half or four weeks, he’s been applying his management knowledge in real time to this Herculean task, really. Srikant, you’re probably one of the busiest people at Harvard, so thank you so much for taking some time to share your insights with our listeners today.
SRIKANT DATAR: It’s a great pleasure, Brian, and thank you for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: I’ll let our listeners know, normally we produce this podcast live from Klarman Hall at Harvard Business School. Today, I am in my remote office at home, and Srikant I don’t know where you are, but we are finding out how to be virtual in producing our podcast too. Everybody’s kind of learning as we go here. Social distancing, we know that. We’ve learned lots of new words. Srikant, Cold Call listeners love to tune in to hear faculty discussing the business cases they write. Oftentimes, I’ll ask them how students might react to a case, but we never really talk about the case method itself. Even the name of the podcast is kind of a nod to the case method where a faculty member starts a class off by cold calling on one of the participants to say, “get us started here today.” So today we’re actually going to, I think, get behind the curtain a little bit more on the case method and what that’s like. But before we dive into that, let me just ask you, what have the past few weeks been like for you?
SRIKANT DATAR: It’s interesting, Brian. Extremely hectic because we were told around March 9 that the University, given the coronavirus situation, was requesting students to leave campus because it was a risky situation and that, by March 23 exactly two weeks later, we had to be ready to deliver the program online, the MBA program online. So by that, we mean all classes that were scheduled for the Required Curriculum and the Elective Curriculum had to be done online, in that span of two weeks. We are very blessed at the Harvard Business School that we have a phenomenally competent set of people, a number of people who are, as I like to say, ready and willing to run toward the fire. We run a very distributed model of leadership here, so the team really more than anything else was assembled very quickly and the team worked together by a tremendous amount of collaboration and teamwork. Everyone willing to contribute to actually stand up this program required a lot of infrastructure to be put up, a lot of training of faculty to be done, new roles created like our “online learning facilitators”, but eventually successfully stood up the program. So a real tip of my hat and a real grateful thanks and admiration for the team that did it.
BRIAN KENNY: Yes, universities aren’t typically thought of as being particularly nimble places, so I think everybody is flexing muscles that they didn’t know that they had before. Can you just describe what were some of the functions that were on the team that you’ve talked about?
SRIKANT DATAR: So we had a group of faculty and staff playing very major roles here. So clearly one important part was to set up the technology infrastructure. We ended up choosing Zoom, but of course needed to then figure out the hardware that we needed, the connectivity that we needed, hotspots that we needed. That was the IT team taking a role. Then my colleagues in the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning, they took the lead in developing a program to train 125 faculty, almost all of whom had never taught online before. Of course, to your earlier point, using the case method. But we realized very early on in the team that we needed to innovate in the learning model and the teaching model because, when you’re in class, the faculty goes into the class, the students are in class and there’s nobody else there. When you’re online, the support that you need and the way in which you go to deliver is sufficiently different. I think would be novel for a lot of our colleagues that we then trained the 125 staff members to create this new role that was an innovation that came up in the course of the task force work very early on, “online learning facilitators.”
SRIKANT DATAR: These folks were drawn from all parts of the school. We then recruited a number of students who had taught online so that the faculty could actually get practice with it. So then we had another group of people who were tasked with recruiting these students to be online so that faculty would run a practice session. So they became part of the team. Altogether, about 300 people were involved in this two week effort. The task force itself was about 35 strong. Amazing experience. We had a lot of fun doing it. Many contrasting words that we heard, exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. Challenging and fun at the same time. So really just seeing people work and do this was an inspiration as much as it was a long, long, and very long hours of work.
BRIAN KENNY: I think everybody who is in education these days has had to have to find new ways to do things. So I’m sure a lot of people are nodding along in agreement with what you’re saying about what our experience here has been like.
SRIKANT DATAR: As part of the Harvard Business Publishing website, I just wanted to make sure that our listeners knew that everything we did and everything we learned, and tutorials and videos are available for free online at the Harvard Business Publishing website under the virtual teaching. If they search virtual teaching, that’s available free to anyone who wants to use it. We did want to share our learnings with both our colleagues at the other parts of Harvard but more widely as well, including number of schools, and thousands of people have actually approached us to get the benefit of that work. We are just humbled by the interest that people have in it.
BRIAN KENNY: Let’s talk about the case method for a minute because I think the case method poses a unique set of challenges when you’re trying to move something online. It’s not a traditional sort of lecture type approach where you’ve got a teacher in the front of the room who’s speaking to a class and people are taking notes. It’s a much more active type of learning approach. Can you describe kind of the key elements of the case method?
SRIKANT DATAR: The key elements of the case method, and I think it’s an important point that you’re making Brian, that right from the very beginning, the task forces’ principles were that we still wanted to create a transformational learning experience online. We were interested in maintaining all the benefits that we have and get from the case method. Students are given a case. It’s some business context or a situation you know about how to design a compensation system, what might be a good strategy for a company to follow, where might they expand, how might they improve a process. The case almost always has three or four decision points that managers must exercise, use already the knowledge that they have, but then exercise judgment. Students coming to class prepared to having read the case debate, discuss, but more importantly listen to alternative points of views and shape their thinking and deepen their thinking based on the arguments that are made. The faculty member plays the role of trying to make sure that the learning is deepened by questions that students are asking and by the interventions that the faculty member might make in order to drive the case to a rich discussion of the issues that helps people hone their judgment and, as I said, they’re learning skills. So it’s a very interactive medium. It’s a participant centered approach. We wanted to retain all of that in our experiences online. We weren’t going to change the case method approach as we were delivering this program online.
BRIAN KENNY: One of the challenges then it sounds like would be how do you take a conversation that normally plays out in a theater style classroom with up to 90 participants at a time, and how do you create the same kind of energy and momentum in an online environment where you’re using… Zoom is the platform that we’ve been using with our students. Are there certain kinds of cases that would work better in that environment?
SRIKANT DATAR: In the Required Curriculum, just to kind of indicate the span of courses we were dealing with, the Business, Government and the International Economy is a course that is a required course that is offered in this semester. So they’re dealing with the issues that are happening across countries and trying to understand the political and the macroeconomic, as well as the institutional arrangements. We had courses on negotiations, so where people had to go into breakout rooms, which Zoom allows, and we wanted to make sure that was done well. We have a course in finance, and so people had technical material that was being delivered. We had courses in leadership and corporate accountability around ethics and legal frameworks and how do those intersect as managers make decisions. We wanted to be sure that all of these could be supported. I think there are three or four guiding principles that I think helped a faculty do that well. Number one, in the beginning, you are never going to cover as much material. Just the technology gaps that come, so almost thinking that … going to class thinking that you would only cover 75% of that material. Number two, try and get as much data about what people think they’re coming into class with based on the pre class preparation. So we encouraged faculty to do polls. We can do polls outside. These are not polls inside Zoom, but do polls outside the classroom. So you already know what people’s thoughts and views are so you can draw them out much more quickly than what we might ordinarily need to do in the physical classroom. We recommended that faculty use polls inside class so that you’re creating a lot of energy. Use breakout rooms to create a lot of energy.
BRIAN KENNY: Just pause for a second. How do you do a breakout room? I don’t need to get all the technical details, but it sounds to me like that would be a very difficult thing to manage.
SRIKANT DATAR: Oh, well it turns out to be in Zoom a very interesting feature that can be done quite easily. What you do in a breakout room is you can either randomly or pre-select it in a preselected fashion. Take a class of 90 and let’s say you wanted to have them discuss in a small group of six. You can send them out into a breakout room online, so they actually happen to go into different 15 breakout rooms. Six of them are discussing it. You can announce what it is that you want them to discuss and then you can call them back into the class, they reassemble in class and share what it is that that smaller group did. It just allows because online, by the way, all the 90 tiles appeared on the screen, but they appear on different screens. So you can’t see everyone at the same time, and then you in sort of boards, we asked faculty to type into PowerPoint slides So students are then able to follow the discussion because you don’t have the access to boards. The key there is to constantly keep the students engaged because when they’re at a distance, they might tend to be a little more distracted than they would be if they were in the physical classroom.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and there’s no place to hide in the physical classroom.
SRIKANT DATAR: That’s correct.
BRIAN KENNY: You got to be present.
SRIKANT DATAR: That’s right.
BRIAN KENNY: How do you facilitate kind of the back and forth dialogue that happens? I’ve been able to sit in on a lot of classes at Harvard Business School and I know that part of the brilliance of the teaching there is the faculty member orchestrating the conversation back and forth between the students. How do you bring some of that to life in this setting?
SRIKANT DATAR: It turned out, Brian, to be very facile. We were able to do it. Zoom has a function where you can put up a hand if you wanted to speak, much like you would raise your hand in the physical classroom. So a lot of the faculty could either cold call, as your podcast is called, and we can just call on people even if they haven’t put up their hand just to keep the energy in the classroom going. But many times you want to bring into the discussion people who have put up their hands because they might have something very important and valuable to say. You call on them. Zoom immediately focuses on that individual. Everyone else listens, and then you go to the next part. By the way, if you’ve taken a poll, the poll outcomes actually show up on zoom. So if someone had said yes, you like this compensation arrangement or no you don’t like it, you can go back and forth between people who are voting yes or no, and on your PowerPoint, your recording what it is that they’re doing. So it requires a little bit of practice to do, Brian, but given a strong belief that this kind of participant centered learning really adds a lot of value to a student’s learning, it’s something that we’re getting better and better at as we continue to teach online.
BRIAN KENNY: So one of our listeners asked about assessment. We know that, at Harvard, participation counts for a fair amount of the student’s grade. Is that something that we would shift or change, or are we thinking about doing that differently now that we’re in an environment where it’s a little bit more difficult maybe to get your air time?
SRIKANT DATAR: It’s an interesting question. So there are two ways I would respond. One is a faculty have come up with very innovative ways to figure out who has participated and it’s an interesting dual structure, if you will, and here’s what I mean. On the one hand, if I’m already asking people to respond to answers in a poll because I want to be ready to call on the right set of people at the right time, students are already therefore submitting answers, and I can take that into account as to whether how well they were prepared as they came in and what they would have done even if I can’t, as I said, get as many people into the discussion as I might in a physical classroom. The second approach is there’s a chat function in Zoom. So some faculty are saying, look, if you can’t respond immediately because we may not get to anyone, why don’t you put in a chat? It can come directly to the instructor. There are different settings where you can only talk directly to the instructor or have it publicly broadcast among your students. Here, they can communicate in ways beyond what they’re actually speaking. Still, I think we are early stages. My sense is that people are keeping a good track of it. They are able to follow what people are saying and they might make some small adaptations, but won’t make a very big one on that particular topic. Now there are issues around how much you want to worry about the grading curve and so on. That’s a separate topic. But just around the participation, my best guest right now is we might make some modifications at the margin, but it’s working fairly well I think in terms of faculty getting a sense about how people are participating that we may not need to vary it too much.
BRIAN KENNY: It sounds like perhaps using this sort of a technology-based approach might actually have some benefits that you don’t get in the classroom.
SRIKANT DATAR: It’s fascinating that you say that because, after I attended that class, I asked the faculty member concerned. I said, “Are there things that you saw in the online class that might actually be some amount of benefits than what you might’ve seen in the regular class?” There were a couple interesting ones that I think are worth mentioning. One is, for whatever reason, when you’re at a distance away, the students that might have been a little more shy or reticent or not as easy comfortable to jump in, somehow were participating more. Now whether that was because we give them other feedback or for other explanations for it. But they were able to do that very effectively and very well. I think the faculty also benefited from the various tools that were available to them in order to be able to share that idea. A very interesting one that came up was when we are writing on our boards, Brian. Sometimes you’ve written the board in a particular way and then you wanted to kind of fill in the middle, and you say, “Oh boy, I didn’t leave enough space.” You either erase or you do it. When you on PowerPoint, it’s straight forward. You just go in there and type and you’ve got your boards exactly the way you would want them to be. So there are some benefits online and, as we begin to get more comfortable with the technology, I think more and more will appear. So we all miss the classroom, we miss the human connection, we miss the engagement that comes with it and the energy that comes with it because it’s not physically there. So it’s hard to say that we won’t miss that classroom, but I think there our benefits.
BRIAN KENNY: I will say the boards in business school classrooms are some of the most impressive things you’re ever going to see. So I’m sure that’s a big adjustment for faculty. Let me ask if faculty also need to do some adjusting in terms of their delivery. You’re not able to move about the classroom. You’re kind of stuck in a stationary place. For some faculty who like to move about, that’s probably a challenge. Do you give guidance on things like voice inflection and delivery and animation and things like that?
SRIKANT DATAR: I think the two basic pieces of guidance that we’ve tried to give faculty because people will come up with their own styles. One very interestingly is we created what was called a Slack channel. I think that’s another good innovation that I would suggest that anyone teaching online do. This is where faculty have come up with an idea or they’re trying to debate whether they should do something and they’re looking for others to help contribute. One of the faculty members there indicated that they prefer to stand when they’re teaching, because you feel a little bit too constrained when you’re sitting down. So they described how they their computer up and they’re actually standing and moving around and trying to replicate some of what they do in the classroom. The second to your point is inflection, but constantly doing something: breakout rooms, polls, get pre-polls done. Look at a chat. It’s the way to kind of inject more energy either through voice or through tools and techniques that we use.
BRIAN KENNY: We did have somebody ask about how to include a protagonist or a visitor at a class, which is something we do quite a bit at Harvard Business School. How do you bring them into the conversation in this realm?
SRIKANT DATAR: So a very good question, and an important one. We have a lot of protagonists, as you say Brian. So what we have done typically is, there’s a whole process by which we have students enter into a waiting room before they get admitted into the classroom. Again, just from a security point of view and so on. When there is a protagonist, we indicate what the Zoom link is to the class that they can attend, and then they just become a participant as if they are a participant in the class, and at the appropriate time is we often do in a physical classroom, Brian, we go to the protagonist to then share their views and parts much like we would do in the physical classroom. So that fortunately has not been much of a problem. I think the issue is when you’ve got international students themselves, connectivity becomes an issue. I know for some of our listeners, the connectivity of the students, in some cases their inability to be able to get online easily, depending upon different groups of students, is an issue.
BRIAN KENNY: So Srikant, we are about a week and a half into this and we’ve talked a lot about what the faculty experience has been like. But can you tell me a little bit about how the students are responding to this? It’s a pretty jarring change for them as well.
SRIKANT DATAR: The students, Brian, clearly as you say, it’s a jarring change. It happened abruptly. You can imagine all the emotions they’re going through as particularly the second year students who would be finishing at the school at this time. They’ve suddenly had to go up, go out and be online now, but they have really embraced this and welcomed the ability for them to get together. I think they all appreciate the very difficult situation of it. They are very thoughtful and aware of what is happening. I think the learning has been very good. I think they have been positively surprised to some extent. I would say we have been with the experience online being better than what we thought it might be. So I think the experience has gone well. I think the other thing that made it work is really the students embracing it and trying very hard to do the best we could under the circumstances. Then our faculty colleagues going over and beyond to make sure that they could deliver a fabulous experience online, preparing differently, getting ready for it, and doing it. Also, I think then setting up the relationship with the students and creating a culture where people were patient with each other. There was forbearance and we knew that there would be mistakes and so people were forgiving and trying to each work the best they could together to solve problems. At the same time, very resourceful, coming up with new ways of doing things that we hadn’t even imagined and being very adaptive to being flexible in the way in which we would have to do it. So, I just have to give both our students and faculty enormous, enormous credit for the way in which they have really worked together to create the best possible experience they could.
BRIAN KENNY: So one last question for you, Srikant. I’m going to ask you to go out on a limb a little bit on this one, but given the fact that you know, we have found ourselves cells able to accomplish this in such a short period of time and we’re learning how to adjust and adapt to it as are many, many other schools around the world. Do you think that this will signal a change for the future of MBA education? You’ve written books on this, you’ve studied it extensively. Do you see this as maybe a turning point? Will things ever be just the same again I guess is the question?
SRIKANT DATAR: In my view, Brian and then I am going out on a limb in my response here. In my view, I firmly and strongly believe that coming out of this crisis, we will have all developed a new muscle, a new way of engaging with students, a new way of finding the best aspects of online education, as we were talking about earlier, to combine it with the model by which we are physically together. So maybe finally, at the end of all of this Brian, we would have learned so much about what a very good hybrid classroom might look like. I feel with high probability I would say, that it will not be the same. We will not go back to what it was before.
BRIAN KENNY: All right, our listeners heard it here from you first. Srikant, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all these great insights.
SRIKANT DATAR: It’s a great pleasure and good luck to everybody out there, and please be well and stay safe.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like other podcasts on the HBR Presents network. Whether you’re looking for advice on navigating your career, you want the latest thinking in business and management, or you just want to hear what’s on the minds of Harvard Business School professors, the HBR Presents network has a podcast for you. Find them on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School on the HBR Presents network.