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So professors Huggy Rao and
Bob Sutton spent a lot of the last six years researching the problem of more,
which is when organizations expand a unique set of difficulties happen.
So people are faced with all kinds of different choices on how they want to
expand, who they want to hire, you know, just a host of difficulties.
So, these guys wrote a book called Scaling Up Excellence, and
they wanted to take the learnings in this book and
give them to people who could really use them, that is small business people,
entrepreneurs, and people who don't usually take business school classes.
So they came to us and they wanted to created a MOOC.
>> We work on developing online courses and
the online parts of in person courses here at the graduate School of Business.
I work with faculty members to help develop the activities and assessments for
the online courses and then also work with our video production and
motion graphics team to develop really high quality educational videos.
And then once all that's done,
I help put it together in whatever learning platform we're using.
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>> So, Bob Sutton had the idea of going out into the field and
talking to people like Ben Horowitz of Andreessen and Horowitz, and
Clara Shih of Hearsay Social.
People would actually spend a lot of time scaling real businesses, especially here
in Silicon Valley, applying the lessons of the book to those businesses.
>> So we create the assignments by working with Bob and Huggy,
and also taking into account what would work best in the online environment.
We really want to make sure that participants taking the,
this MOOC could apply the, what they were learning to real life business scenarios.
>> We decided first off that we'd have a weekly show case in student work.
We'd go into Huggy's office and actually present student work to him, and
he'd say, great, that's working well.
>> And participants got really excited when they saw their own work being talked
about in those weekly videos.
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It's really important in terms of scheduling to allow enough time for
team formation and really make sure that all of the, the kinks are worked out in
that process and that we kind of account for all the potential issues.
We also learned that it's really important to engage with those students both on
the faculty side and also as the teaching team and, and technical support team.
We actually set up a Gmail account before hand so that we can start triaging and
handling messages for participants before the MOOC started, and
then there was also the messaging system within NovoEd and the forums.
And so, I was handling lots of messages each day and, and
so was Justin, so was our teaching assistant as well.
>> 85 to 90% of the people who did an assignment in one week
would also do the assignment in the next week.
And we also found that most people watched the videos all the way to the end.
So there wasn't a lot of drop off halfway through the video.
They found the videos engaging and wanted to see the whole thing.
>> There were a lots of things that students
mentioned that they really enjoyed about this course.
They really loved learning from Bob and Huggy.
They really enjoyed the material.
They also really liked the multimedia case study that was often cited as one of
the favorite parts of the MOOC, and a lot of participants really enjoyed what
they were able to accomplish with their teammates.
>> Some of the most successful MOOCs on NovoEd had completion rates of 40, 50,
maybe reaching 60%, and the way NovoEd calculates completion rates
is to take the number of people who completed the first assignment.
And compared to the number of people who completed the actual class.
So, we found in our class, that number was around 61%.
>> I think the most enjoyable part for
me about working on this class was seeing how it all came together and
hearing positive feedback from participants and really seeing.
How they were taking the lessons, and
applying them to their own real life scenarios.
And really, talking about how they were learning a lot from the course.
>> Initially, when we went into the MOOC, I must confess, both Bob and
I underestimated what was involved in the MOOC.
[LAUGH]. And we were educated, of course.
But the other thing we realized is, early on when you're doing the MOOC,
you think you're the chef, organizing this big dinner.
But as the MOOC unfolds you realize, wait a minute,
it's not the chef preparing dinner for everybody, it's a brilliant potluck,
everybody is getting their own dish to eat.
And that was what kind of struck me remarkably.
>> Well, the thing about doing another MOOC is it, it depends largely.
I don't know whether I'd do one unless we have this team because they're so
good and they take so much cognitive load off us.
But as, as Huggy knows, I was initially resistant to this and
said I wouldn't participate, but then it was so good I couldn't help myself.
So, so, it has been a fabulous experience and
really has exceeded my wildest dreams on all sorts of dimensions.
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