It costs $8 million a year, but Lord Dearing's favourite example of online course delivery is going strong, John MacColl reports
It is now four years since the newly appointed dean of Harvard Business School instructed his information technology staff to introduce network delivery of course materials for all students, and changed the way the school did its business almost overnight.
Kim Clark became dean in November 1995. He declared immediately that by January 1996 he wanted the school to be on a par with the best of the world's business schools in use of technology, and by September 1997 to have the leading position. The first 14 weeks were known as the "IT initiative".
"It was certainly stressful," recalled Judy Stahl, executive director of IT. This was top-down implementation of a type rarely found in an academic institution. The IT department shed about 20 posts within a year, not all voluntarily. But the programme worked, the deadlines were met and Harvard Business School now boasts an online learning environment or "course platform" which attracts envious glances from around the world.
Teams of visitors head for the school to find out how they did it. Two members of Lord Dearing's national committee of inquiry into higher education were so impressed that they arranged a second visit by technical experts; their report called the HBS intranet "an exemplar for what could be achieved in other institutions".
"We see four roles for IT at the school" said Stahl. "It has to build new knowledge, through developing tools for research and simulations; to deepen the learning experience of students through the provision of online cases and exercises; to build a global business education community with our 66,000 alumni alongside the 1,600 full-time MBA and 5,000 executive education students; and to create an integrated enterprise."
The 14-week revolution following Clark's appointment saw significant investment result in a network with "aggressive bandwidth", 1,400 desktop machines replaced or upgraded, the rolling out of a standard desktop with Eudora as the single supported email system and the MS Office suite provided on every desktop.
A single username and password admitted all staff and students to the HBS intranet, replacing the multiple log-on conventions previously in force.
"We needed to switch gears," admitted Stahl. "Eight million dollars was spent in doing that and we continue to spend close to $8 million each year in order to sustain the system. Six software developers work full-time on tools development."
The idea is that the Harvard Business School community worldwide should enjoy the same as students on-campus.
Nearly 50 per cent of MBA students are based off-campus so a policy decision limited the number of client-server pair applications to the bare minimum, running as much as possible directly via the web.
In 1996, the school achieved Clark's vision of an entire organisation online. The centrepiece is the Harvard Business School Course Platform, an elegant web-based system, developed entirely in-house, providing a standard course management environment for use by all staff and students. All 200 members of academic staff were publishing their courses on the Course Platform by 1996.
"It has gone from strength to strength," said Judy Stahl. "The fundamental teaching method at the school is the case approach. A large number of cases are now online, though a lot of conversion from print remains to be done, with XML now our preferred standard. In 1998, we switched our web-based streaming video to RealVideo as the standard. We own the copyright on all the videos we create, so there was no problem in converting our entire library for web delivery."
The system has been improved to allow dynamic linking, with each video clip delivered from the most appropriate server for the point on the network from which the user is accessing it. A current maximum of 800 simultaneous streams is possible. Work is in progress on an indexing system that presents users with a number of frames selected from a piece of video, which may be over an hour in playing time, to help them find the part they want to see. Speech recognition technology has been used to index video soundtracks for keyword searching.
Another advance has been a Java-based polling tool. "Faculty have really taken it up," said one of the IT consultants. "It allows them to poll their students on an issue prior to coming to class, discuss their views during class and then poll them again afterwards to see how opinions have changed."
Several hundred polls are now run every month. "The students use it to arrange social events, for movie reviews, all kinds of things."
Administrative information is also fully integrated. Class seating charts are created on-the-fly from an Oracle database, complete with photographs and sound clips of the students pronouncing their own names. Academic staff can study these before going in to teach a new class for the first time. All timetables are on the system. A recent development, this time requested by the students, has been an interface for Palm Pilots, now owned by almost two thirds of students. Users can download their timetables, as well as poll results and assignment topics or pre-class questions.
"There is very little paper left in the system," said Stahl. Email and the web have simply become the authoritative means of administrative and academic communication. No one argues. Even exams are taken by laptop.
Harvard Business School is renowned for its publishing programme as well as its academic excellence. "We have 'Baker Books' now," said Stahl, enthusiastically.
The Baker Library system provides a link to the bibliographic details of newly published books by HBS academic staff. Next to each citation are two order buttons, with the choice to place an order either with HBS Press or, somewhat surprisingly, with amazon.com. How does that square with the managed revolution that created this world-beating proprietary system?
"We're a lot more relaxed now," said Stahl. "We have even permitted a few of our faculty to retain their Macintoshes. We are after all an academic institution - not the defence department." John MacColl is director, SELLIC (science and engineering library, learning and information centre) project, University of Edinburgh. He visited the US on a UCISA travel bursary.