Amidst Competition, HarvardX Turns to New Marketing Strategies

In an increasingly crowded marketplace for massive open online courses, HarvardX faculty and administrators are applying a variety of marketing strategies to spread the word about the courses they offer.

When HarvardX launched in 2012, the program offered only two courses, both of which were hosted by edX, a non-profit joint project between Harvard and MIT to provide a centralized space for MOOCs. The launch, which closely followed the creation of for-profit platforms like Coursera, was met with fanfare and a near unanimous hype among news media. The New York Times dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC,” and millions of users signed up for online courses within months.

But two years out and with dozens of new courses created, HarvardX is facing the challenge of attracting users, sustaining its program financially, and fostering engagement among online students as more for-profit competitors enter the market.

Robert A. Lue, faculty director of HarvardX, said that because the hype for the program has died down since its inception, he and fellow administrators have developed targeted and, in some cases, grassroots marketing strategies to promote HarvardX courses.

According to Lue, HarvardX encourages faculty members who participated in creating online content to promote their courses by using word of mouth, leveraging personal connections, and posting to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

David D. Cox ’00, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology and director of MCB80X: “Fundamentals of Neuroscience,” said that because edX now offers so many courses, it is becoming harder for individual classes to attract attention. As a result, he has turned to targeting specific neuroscience audiences through social media to market his course.

“It matters not how many eyeballs you get, but how engaged are those particular eyeballs,” Cox said. “How much do [students] care about the message that you’re sending.”

Elisa New, a professor of American literature who taught and helped develop two poetry courses for HarvardX, created a video of the Harvard men’s basketball team reading a poem about basketball to market her courses. The video was sent to SB Nation, a sports blog with millions of visitors each month.

“HarvardX and its public affairs people are often looking for creative and interesting ways to let the world know what we are doing,” New said.

According to Lue, though HarvardX does not view other online platforms as competition, the staff still monitor the content their counterparts are creating.

“You have to make a decision,” Lue said. “Do you have a perspective, do you have an angle that’s better or different and worthwhile in comparison to the others?”

Despite the competition, Lue said that HarvardX has always been able to rely on one thing to attract audiences around the world: the Harvard brand.

“The brand always cuts a swath in the field,” Lue said. “Faculty are very committed to us having really effective outreach, because it is their voice. It is their perspective—it is their take on something they feel is very important, so there is a lot of ‘sharing with the world’ notions driving this, so making sure that we can maximize that is important.”

—Staff writer Meg P. Bernhard can be reached at meg.bernhard@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Meg_Bernhard.

—Staff writer Michael V. Rothberg can be reached at mrothberg@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @mvrothberg.