Online education has a loneliness problem. Can Harvard fix it?


As business schools tiptoe into the world of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, Harvard has a plan to sidestep the isolation of online learning—a problem that keeps most students from sticking with the classes, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

Business education at Harvard will go online with “Innovating in Health Care,” a course beginning March 31 on HarvardX, the university’s online learning platform. More than 10,000 students have already registered, according to the school.

It will be the first HarvardX class taught by a dedicated business school instructor: Regina Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. (Herzlinger is no stranger to firsts at the institution: She was also the first woman to be tenured and chaired at the business school.)

Herzlinger has taught innovation and health care at Harvard in person for 43 years. The main goal of her online class is to spur collaboration, interaction, and networking, but that’s difficult when crowded classrooms are replaced with the solitary glow of a home computer monitor.

To overcome the separation factor, she’ll employ a clever collaboration of her own: Herzlinger worked with Svetlana Dostenko to integrate Project Lever, a “sort of EHarmony for building businesses” into the edX platform.

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