Students at Success Academy stay more focused on the dot rug. Photo courtesy HBS Multimedia Development

To tell the compelling stories of a developer working to revitalize Miami Beach, a Maine lobsterman confronting the economic risks of climate change, and a charter schools founder attending to the smallest classroom details to enhance the student learning experience, professors Robin Greenwood, Richard Ruback, and Joshua Coval partnered with HBS’s Multimedia Development team to create media-enhanced cases for the course, Market Perspectives. This finance elective explores the intersection of businesses’ pursuit of profits and their impact on their communities.

“The multimedia components of these cases make the students more invested in the issues because they really get a sense of who the people are and what they are trying to do,” says Greenwood, the George Gund Professor of Finance and Banking and the Anne and James F. Rothenberg Faculty Fellow.

HBS students hear and see Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City, explaining why she believes that every decision school administrators and educators make can have a profound impact on a student’s educational experience—even a decision as small as the design of a rug. In the classrooms for younger children at Success Academy, a portion of the floor is covered with a rug divided evenly into squares, with a big colored dot in the middle of each. It’s a cheerful sight, but that’s not all it is. “The dot rug—the kids’ bottoms go in the circle, and they know their physical space,” explains Moskowitz. “It’s much easier for a teacher to manage with the dot rug.”

When Greenwood and his case coauthor Coval, the Jay O. Light Professor of Business Administration, created a multimedia case about Success Academy, they, too, made a seemingly small decision that has had a big effect on the students in the course Greenwood teaches with Ruback, Baker Foundation Professor and Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance, Emeritus. The traditional case format could not fully capture the passion Moskowitz and her team have for every detail of their schools, realized Greenwood. It also couldn’t effectively show how focused the young students are on their lessons while sitting in their designated spots.

The Success Academy multimedia case has an engaging digital landing page with text, photos, interactive graphs, and video clips. In class discussions, Greenwood can see that many students have dug more deeply into the key questions than they might have with a print case. “You can’t just skim a multimedia case. You really have to invest the time, but the payoff is huge,” he says.

That level of engagement with the protagonists and the business issues they are facing led Greenwood and Ruback to include seven multimedia cases each time they teach the finance class—part of the evolution of this innovative case format that is taking place school wide.

Ruth Page, director of HBS’s Multimedia Development team, dates the first multimedia case to 1995, when the “Pacific Dunlop China” case debuted. The case, which focused on a Beijing sock factory, was primitive by today’s standards with screen text, short, embedded videos, and links to static exhibits, but few design elements or data visualizations. The case was streamed over the internal network for students on campus and distributed outside the school on CD-ROM. Faculty interest in producing such cases rose in the 2010s as the technology improved, but it boomed in 2020 when the pandemic forced HBS into online classrooms and teachers were in search of the best ways to engage students in that new environment.

The number of new media-enhanced cases—a term used to encompass a growing array of digital offerings, including multimedia cases, video-only cases, and print cases with video supplements—has continued to increase every year since, with more than three dozen underway this year alone.

“The case study is such a powerful learning vehicle,” Page says. “And our multimedia cases have many of the same conventions and features that written cases do. There’s text and there are exhibits, but the storytelling in a multimedia case happens through the video. It’s the color commentary.”

“The impact of the multimedia case is that it puts everything in context,” adds Greenwood. “People’s stories come across in a much more vibrant and emotional way.”

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