Proyecto Harvard HBX Live: digital and interactive learning without borders

The Harvard Business School has launched a project, called HBX Live, in which teachers teach their classes live from a television set and to which students from all over the world can connect and participate in real time.

Harvard Business Shool (HBS), Harvard University Business and Graduate School, the oldest in the United States, offers the possibility of attending one of its main classroom classes live, along with more than a thousand other students from all over the world, via the Harvard HBX Live project, that transforms traditional face-to-face learning into interactive and online.

Students who want to participate in Harvard HBX Live can connect from anywhere in the world and at the same time to take part in one of these real-time classes taught by HBS professors from a television studio, located on the public station WGBH in downtown Boston.

For this, the set has been customized with a gigantic high-resolution curved video screen (con 6,2 million pixels) in which the image is shown on individual displays (each of 60×0,76 cm) up to a maximum of sixty participants (as an amphitheater of an auditorium so that everyone is visible) simultaneously connecting through the network with their personal computers. The rest of the students can audit the sessions through an observer or listener model.

To develop the Harvard HBX Live project, Those responsible for this business school have worked for three years with McCann Systems, specialist in audiovisual solutions, y Shepley Bulfinch, architecture and planning firm that designed the set platform. Besides, technologies are used Cisco for video streaming; BSS Audio, to soundproof the set and sound equipment, and the X20 software platform, as well as a digital whiteboard that does not generate flashes in cameras.

In this unique virtual classroom, visual and interactive, all television resources have been used to recreate the face-to-face teaching environment of a classroom, for which there are two councilors and two directors, as if it were a live program, that coordinate and mix the images collected by the five cameras on the set (one of them mobile) of the teacher and students connected.

Among other challenges that have had to be solved, the work of soundproofing the studio and optimizing the communications signal so that delays do not occur stands out., cuts or interruptions during live class (only students connected in observer mode have a small delay in receiving audio), since the sixty participants and the teacher have their microphones permanently open during the session not only so that the interactivity is total, but precisely to recreate the natural environment that a traditional class would have.

The response from both the students who have participated in this interactive classroom and the teachers has been very satisfactory., according to surveys carried out by HBS, to the point that a 96% of them assures that they will connect again to attend a live class, while underlining the ability of this project to overcome geographical borders.

In this sense, From HBS they highlight that “we have participants from a wide variety of world time zones with whom we can interact as if they were physically present.”, not only virtually, in the same room in an impressive way. That's why we are exploring the use of HBX Live for new purposes., from teaching to executive programs, seminars for professors from different universities to research activities”.

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