About IT: Learning Design and Training Services

Who Are They & What Do They Do? 

The Learning Design & Training Services (LDTS) team partners with the HBS community to ensure that HBS’s top notch courses and deliverables are facilitated effectively using the team’s creative, technical, and pedagogical knowhow. This team helps make learning effective and acts as a liaison between tech and the campus’s end users. They achieve this by consulting, advocating, and creating sustainable solutions; by demystifying technical language and processes to improve understanding of technologies; and by providing accessible and inclusive learning experiences across various modalities.  

The LDTS team is a host of knowledge. Being so entwined with the broader HBS community, they form genuine connections with those they work with and strive to find solutions. These solutions are typically not one size fits all, which means that each day could look very different in terms of the needs they are trying to fulfil. Through instructional design consultations, they piece together the puzzles they’re presented with, perhaps even finding the real problem hidden behind the initial one. They then think about how these solutions can be sustained, and then scaled, in the future. And so over time, they will continue to learn and adapt technologically to best serve the community as it evolves. 

How Do They Stand Out? 

The LDTS team has a great hand in modernizing HBS’s and HBS IT’s practices. They were necessary in the creation of the hybrid classrooms and the virtual teaching support website that kept teaching and learning possible during the pandemic. The website was created within a week, and in the following week, they held thirty trainings to show instructors and support staff how to use it. They’ve created a host of interactive resources, rather than static PDFs, to make training more effective for users. From instructor-led trainings to asynchronous eLearnings, on-campus consultations to Zoom drop-in sessions, the Learning Design & Training Services meets our community where they are.   

The LDTS team members are comprised of educators at heart, some of them with teaching experience and many of them bringing a liberal arts and humanities background to HBS IT. Within IT, it can be very easy to view a project with a granular view, often forgetting that the average end user is not a tech professional, but this team prides themselves in being able to take a step back and look at things more broadly. When working with stakeholders and creating solutions, they are uniquely equipped to approach with a variety of perspectives: as teachers, as learners, as ends users, and as IT professionals.