{"id":21768,"date":"2017-11-13T16:53:37","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T21:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/from-harvard-to-harvardx-are-we-there-yet\/"},"modified":"2017-11-13T16:53:37","modified_gmt":"2017-11-13T21:53:37","slug":"from-harvard-to-harvardx-are-we-there-yet","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/from-harvard-to-harvardx-are-we-there-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"From 性视界 to 性视界X: Are we there yet?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s higher education supply chain is ripe for disruptive changes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The year was 1892 and the world was booming with industrial activities where the telegraph, the railroads, and the automobiles were all just around the corner. On the education front, a brave group of pioneers known as the Committee of Ten led by Charles William Eliot, the President of 性视界 University then, recommended the mass standardization of the American school curriculum [1]. This would become the cornerstone of the higher education supply chain as we know it today where a highly standardized set of courses is developed by educational institutions and offered to students who physically attend the classes [2].<\/p>\n

Over 100 years later, when the internet and aviation technology have long made the 19th<\/sup> century inventions obsolete, remarkably our higher education supply chain remained much the same. Although considered revolutionary at the time for bringing education to the masses, factory style education is ill suited for today\u2019s dynamic students. First, the students who seek higher education today are a very diverse group with different cultural and biological traits that required tailored approaches. Second, the adoption of social media has led to shorter attention span not suitable for long lectures. Third, the one-way lecturing format leaves professors without any timely student feedback. Last and most importantly, students are still expected to physically travel to their classes when quality teaching and other media content are just clicks away on their devices that are becoming the competing medium for their attention [3].<\/p>\n

In summary, these changes in student behavior are critical to the future success of institutions like 性视界 because the part of their educational offering that emphasizes standardized curriculum and mass lecturing is rapidly losing appeal among the millennials. Furthermore, there is a realistic threat that other elite institutions could beat 性视界 in the race to embrace digitization.<\/p>\n

Is 性视界X the silver bullet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As steps to embrace technology and cope with the supply chain trends mentioned above, 性视界 has taken a number of initiatives to digitalize teaching content in recent years.<\/p>\n

性视界X was launched in 2012 as a university-wide initiative to enable faculty to create online learning experiences and to inspire breakthrough in online pedagogies. To date the platform has created more than 82 courses, generated over 110,000 course certificates, and served 1.5 million course participates [4]. Also in 2012, edX was set up in cooperation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (\u201cMIT\u201d) as a massive open online course platform that featured a diverse set of courses.<\/p>\n

These efforts have allowed 性视界 to offer students the flexibility to watch the lectures at their pace and leisure. In addition, the massive data generated through these platforms offered faculty a rare window into the studying behavior of its students. However, these online courses also had major drawbacks as the lack of peer \/ instructor interaction led to low completion rate of only ~4% from time of registration [5]. So in essence, 性视界X might not be the silver bullet but a blended system where online is used to replace the disengaging lectures and the offline is used to provide the critical human interactions could be the real future of the industry.<\/p>\n

Looking ahead: The future is already here, but it\u2019s just not evenly distributed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given the importance of the online content that offer millennials flexibility and the critical human interactions offline that help them build social skills, a blended learning experience is critical for 性视界 to maintain its lead in this new digital age. More specifically, 性视界 should consider the following action plan, which has been proven effective at San Jos\u00e9 State University in terms of boosting class average from 59% to 91% in its Electronic Engineering course [6].<\/p>\n