Columbia Business School Executive Education offers executives and organizations a variety of approaches, programs and means to excel. The broad portfolio of non-degree programs for individuals span the topics management, leadership,strategy, finance, marketing, and social enterprise. Programs for organizations are designed specifically to an organization’s professional development needs.

The Challenge

In 2014 Columbia’s Business School was ready to jump into creating non-degree online courses for the first time. We were brought in to kick off the first pilot program and assess whether adult learners were intrigued by a digital course offering. But how could we ensure digital offerings were as engaging and rigorous as the executive education programs that took place on campus? So much of the campus program experience was a networking opportunity for busy professionals. Would learners still come out of the online course feeling connected to their peers?

The Learner

Learners in executive education online programs are busy professionals typically in full-time leadership roles. Some programs are paid for by the learners, others are sponsored by their employers. These learners are based all over the world, and during our time building out solutions for the school, there was significant focus on business professionals in India and West Africa.

“Columbia made me an online learning addict.”— Online Student, 2017

We needed to design learning experiences that were tailored to weekend completion, highly engaging between students and provided top tier student support. It was important that students feel as supported and appreciated as they did when visiting campus.

The Solution

We began by crafting a 10 week online course pilot with tenured Columbia faculty using Canvas LMS in 2014. Using insights from that first course, we crafted additional courses in the following months and a consistent framework began to appear.

The team consisted of: Instructional Designer (C.A. Long, MFA), Online Course Director, Videographer and a University professor (Subject Matter Expert).

• Filmed and edited classroom lecture videos via Final Cut Pro for an entire course semester. We used 2 to 3 camera set ups and high def image capture for a better quality experience.

• We hired a vendor to transcript the video lectures to follow accessibility guidelines.

• Implemented web graphics and visual layouts for Canvas pages in accordance with W3C accessibility standards.

• Implemented weekly discussion boards with a student support specialist so that students never felt alone on the platform. The student support specialist contacted students within 12hrs and reached out to any student who hadn’t logged in every 4 days to chat with them about how the process was going.

• A networking assignment was created the first week of the course, encouraging students to share short bios and insights about the industries they work in.

The Result

From 2014 to 2018 we produced over 45 digital courses for the school, serving international audiences from a range of industries.

In this very first pilot we implemented A/B testing within weekly messages to the students in order to assess what types of feedback inspired students to log in more and engage with other students more.

We also invited college research students to comb through the user activity in the learning platform. This data helped us continue to iterate on the pilot course and make additional changes as it ran every 4 months. Survey data indicated high satisfaction from learners and a high return rate of enrolling in additional courses.