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"Online courses are a great cost saving tool" - Interview with Harvard professor Dr. Mark Esposito



Technology is constantly changing, and with an influx of innovative prototypes available, old-fashioned learning approaches are going to develop in the coming future. During these big changes, people are still wondering whether it has been overall good or bad for learning and the community around them. I believe that technology has helped with making tasks faster and more efficient. It has also created jobs and facilitated individuals to learn in a simplistic way, yet it has deprived the current and future generation from learning and storing the information learned long term, since technology is constantly changing, and the demands for certain sets of skills are growing; stretching out inequality. These constant changes will influence the social economy and consumerism as a whole.
To have further input on the subject, we conducted an interview with our IE Business School, Economic Environment professor Dr. Mark Esposito.
Dr. Mark Esposito is a Professor of Business and Economics at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education and at Hult International Business School, Agenda Contributor on the World Economic Forum and author of various books including the co-founder of the DRIVE framework with Terence Chee Ming Tse in the book Understanding How the Future Unfolds: Using Drive to Harness the Power of Today's Megatrends. Amongst the numerous accolades, he was introduced into Thinkers50 Radar in 2016.
Twitter:@Exp_Mark
The number of years of formal education are an important indicator used to measure a country’s education level. With online education on the rise, do you think this indicator is still relevant?
I think so, because I don’t think online education will naturally change the nature of education per say, because online education is allowing us to cover market or demands that we currently do not have, the fact that we are having that level of flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean that we are replacing the old or the new one, but we are adding capacity to something we did not have before. Therefore, I see this more as expanding the pie rather than thinking that the same pie is not changing shape, and we are now replacing physical with online. There is a major premise with online education, which was some time back, thinking that we would replace traditional breaking mortar, but it hasn’t. On the contrary, many companies/universities have their normal operations, but they use online to expand to those people that were not happy with the financial or geographical capacity to come over, or to do. For example, short courses or week courses for a specific type of audience. Nevertheless, I don’t think it will be as much as a game changer as we thought it used to be.
Do you think online education will close or broaden the “Education gap”?
If it’s going to be designed based on the closing of the gap, then it means that it will. The problem now is whether or not it will be designed to do that. If by itself, unless you are designing it for the purpose of education it’s going to try to help people who are changing from one job to another to close that gap, that of course will be affected. However, if you are designing with the intention of creating expectation on employability that does not exist yet, that might be dangerous. Thus, I think that it will depend greatly on whether we are going to have a university to really understand the nature of the markets and how the markets need training, as it is currently not delivered and use online to do it quicker than if you can do it in the physical world, where you would take longer.
In your opinion, who should drive investments in online education? Private or public institutions?
I started thinking that it should be both. You cannot have a public system that completely becomes non competitive because they cannot compete with a private offer, but you cannot have education which is so critical as an asset class to be entirely in the hands of a private company. So that example would be a public and private partnership where we have a public university  using a private company to provide service but not discounting the fact that it’s a public university. I think that there is a lot of opportunities for private companies to start working with public schools to make sure that they can cover parts of the market that they currently don’t cover. I don’t believe there should be a tradeoff between the two. I’d like to think that governments invest in online education as much as the private sector. The more we make them as part of an orchestrated effort, the more we improve in the end game (education), so I never see this as a tension.

Do you see online education as an effective cost saving tool for the public?
It is an effective cost saving tool because of course, like we do in the economics class, in online education, the marginal costs tends to be quite low if not near zero, when you have additional students joining. But it cannot be a mass distribution tool unless you are doing something for basic tools, for example LinkedIn, that are entering into the basic tools market because they say if we don’t know what strategy exists then let me give you a course. If you don’t know what a financial statement is, let me give you a course. So, I think maybe online would be great and they are profitable for the very basic stuff. Physical education might start defining and specializing, but as an economic model, it is phenomenal to generate revenue that we don’t have.
Are there risks regarding online education that you see?
Not per say, but it’s also true that what defies the learning mechanism sometimes can only be defined with the content or the platform. There is a networking dimension that is important that is not properly well captured. You can argue, yet you can do discussions, you can do board, you can do video conferences, and they are great in comparison to what we used to have years back. Nevertheless,  they will never replace the physical experience, so I think the risk will be to have only online education platforms. I think that if you have the online experience complementing with the physical, you would be having the best of both worlds, but entirely online is not feasible. I just find that when we are generating intermediaries, which is the technology between the learning and the content, you create one type of experience that is not comparable to the same one as the one we actually have when we are in a physical place.
In your book “Understanding How the Future Unfolds”: you mention a framework you call DRIVE, that assesses five related megatrends. How do you believe that by understanding those megatrends might help the future of education and the way people look at technology as a tool for learning and work?
The question is interesting because what DRIVE does is to prove some of the traditional conventional theories wrong. First of all, the distance for demographics. We want to understand how we, as society, are changing. Previously, we used to come from a model of the population pyramid and now we hardly live in a pyramid anymore, as the number of children are not as many as it used to be. In terms of resources, we are running more and more of them. Consequently, that part is more about building awareness about consumption and the use of materials. However, I think what really helps in education is AI, because in AI we discovered a lot of our financial systems, which they inherently generate inequality. So what we are understanding now, even when we think about something that supposedly maximizes a value, it might maximize the value in the short term, but it might maximize inequality as well. Therefore, there are multiple repercussions to that. In the I(inequalities), we discovered that most of the emergent economies are coming up with business models that we have never known before, so we challenge our assumption of entrepreneurship and our assumption of strategy. Consequently, I think DRIVE taught me (throughout the research time) how many of the conventional theories in business schools tend to be obsolete, with increasing importance on the internal lying format. They really try to compensate what we used to know, to what we think will actually be useful to know in the future.

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