Reviews ASTD Members Only

Harvard Business Online
Review by Tom Abraham, Tim Anderson, and Bill Ellet

Establishing a brand was a business obsession of the nineties. In its proper sphere of education and research, the Harvard brand is to die for. But what does it mean in the pragmatic world of online training?

The company

Harvard Business Online is the e-learning division of Harvard Business School Publishing, a wholly owned, not-for-profit subsidiary of the university. The e-learning division provides leadership and general management expertise through online programs to customers including Bose, Unilever, Novartis, and Fleet Bank.

In the e-learning training market, Harvard is a niche player offering education and performance support for mid-level managers and up. It seems more attuned and committed to the training market than it has been in the past.

Given its close association with the Harvard Business School, the operation would be expected to have an inside track on content from Harvard faculty. But it is not the official online mouthpiece for HBS. Content is drawn from sources inside and outside the school and inside and outside academia.

Although the e-learning division is new, Harvard Business School Publishing is not a newcomer to interactive instruction aimed at the training market. The predecessor of the online products was a CD-ROM series launched in the mid-1990s.

Producers based in academic institutions would seem to be more stable than their for-profit competitors. Nevertheless, academic fashions and commitments shift more than one might expect. The Harvard video line, for example, evaporated quickly, although a market for it remains to this day. Another factor to consider is service. Elite academic institutions are not known for their service orientation. Harvard Online seems to understand that after-sales service is important, but potential customers should ask about it.

The products

Three people evaluated Harvard courses. Following Training Media Review policy, all of the reviewers are training or human resource professionals. All of the reviews were done “blind”; that is, the reviewers did not discuss their evaluations or ratings with each other during the review process. Providers are never charged a fee for TMR reviews.

Harvard Business Online has two product lines: ManageMentor, a performance support system, and online courses such as Leadership Transitions and Managing Change. As mentioned above, the latter have evolved from CD-ROM courses developed by Harvard Business School Publishing in the 1990s. The online courses take the same general approach, organization, and sometimes topics as the multimedia products. This is good news for customers because the producer has had the time, experience, and user feedback to refine the product--a rare occurance in the e-learning industry.

The ManageMentor series dispenses compact lessons on a broad range of management topics, currently 28. The topic selection maps best to the duties of a working middle manager and not an executive, as was the preferred audience of Harvard content in the recent past.

The Harvard Business Online courses are case based and provide many articles and a number of assessments. They also suggest that students work with a mentor. The producer resists the word course to describe the format because its developers have designed the content to be studied in short sessions, as a response to the realities of the training market.

Ten minutes is suggested as the least amount of time it takes to learn something from these courses, a term we use for lack of a better one. Our reviewer confirms that you can study the content this way, but we remain skeptical about how much a user is going to get out of it if he or she devotes no more than 10 minutes at a time.

Harvard Business Online has priced its content to be competitive with other online providers. We give retail prices in the reviews, but customers making quantity purchases receive discounts.

The Training Media Review team evaluated these Harvard online courses:

• E-business
• Harvard ManageMentor series
• Decision Making
• Influencing and Motivating Others
• Leadership Transitions
• Managing Change
• Managing Virtual Teams
• What Is a Leader?

Individual reviews of the courses are available to ASTD E-Learning members at www.tmreview.com.

Pros and cons

ManageMentor modules don’t teach skills. They don’t even give you a deep understanding of a topic. They provide some important ideas and suggest processes to think about. The content is generally good, but coverage can be thin. The series' learning design effectively presents the information, but it works better for some topics, for example, managing up, than it does for others, such as writing. For harried middle managers, the modules can be useful on-the-job references and complement to formal training. Our recommendation would be to pick and choose modules.

The online courses have a more ambitious agenda. They teach management-level analysis and the planning piece of action. It goes without saying--almost--that the content must be part of a blended learning solution. No one is going to learn to be a better manager solely by taking an online course, even one as thoughtful as Harvard's. The courses would be good subjects for class discussion, both the students’ experience with the cases and some of the readings. The next step would be to relate the learning to students’ own organization or company.

Most of the courses in the Harvard Online library are case based. On the one hand, the case method is not a good fit with online instruction. Because a case itself teaches nothing, the method depends almost entirely on a dialogue among students and an instructor-facilitator who is also a subject matter expert. On the other hand, the case method is a way to overcome the disconnect and tedium users often feel with online self-paced instruction.

In general, Harvard has done a good job of adapting the method to an alien environment. The case format draws learners into a situation that asks them to think as leaders must, and it makes possible learning from mistakes as well as successes. Harvard also integrates content such as articles and modules from prominent experts to help users understand the case, inform their decisions, and extend their learning beyond the case. The richness of both the content and the method is, simply put, valuable.

Still, across the board, the interactivity could be improved. That was the one category in which reviewers found the Harvard courses to be no more than average.

	Harvard Business Online
Holds user interest	***
Production quality	***
Ease of navigation	***
Interactivity	**
Instructional value	***
Value for the money	***
Overall rating	***