You may have read about in another Lever Magazine post as we were mentioned in Bloomberg Businessweek, but the countdown comes to a close as we anticipate our biggest platform date to launch. 17,000 students at Harvard Business School taking the “Innovating in Health Care”will be eligible to sign up for our online platform. March 31st will definitely flutter the dovecotes here in the office!
At all other universities utilizing Project Lever, our platform guides students at their university with help during the research process. Using a linguistics-based algorithm, students can connect with faculty advisors at their university, find available funding sources, past thesis topics, and relevant courses. Essentially, it is an aggregation of resources for budding student researchers that is personalized.
For Harvard’s massive open online course (or MOOC), the platform will be a little different. We will be connecting students to students. The class is all about medical innovation, and what better way to promote innovation than to group together the students so they can brainstorm and bounce ideas off each other. These scholars are taking Harvard’s class from laptops all around the world! With our help, we can bring them together based on topic of interest and timezone, and cultivate collaboration, interaction, and networking.
Professor Regina Herzlinger and Project Lever’s Svetlana Dotsenko came together to create this program to not only spur innovation in the class, but hopefully also to lower the much-debated drop out rate for MOOCs. The theory is that if we bring students together into teams, they will be more likely to complete the course because they will feel an obligation towards each other.
We’ve gotten more server space and checked and rechecked all the coding - we’re ready for the 17,000!
We’re ready for takeoff.
