#research_benchmarking

The Adjacent Possible

This is a great summary of Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From”. You should give it a read! I admit I didn’t initially get the idea of the Adjacent Possible when I first encountered it, but this article helped me understand what Johnson was getting at.

Ideas don’t happen in a vacuum, they are the result of the communication and sharing ideas. Maybe one of the reasons for the increased rate of technological advance is how easily we can share ideas nowadays.

For designers, we couldn’t dream of a more perfect environment. I don’t have to leave my bedroom to get in contact with thousands of other designers and to share ideas with them.

For us, The Adjacent Possible means we don’t have to keep to our own areas of expertise to find inspiration. Just because we are designing an online learning platform doesn’t mean we only have to look at other education platforms for insight.

We’ve looked a lot at different online learning platforms for inspiration for our product so far, but if Steven Johnson is to be believed, we should also be looking elsewhere.

There’s a lot to go through here, so I’m going to summarize my main points before going into the meat of the research.

Summary

A major issue we encountered through our research was how user content was managed. On platforms like Skillshare and Udemy, any user can publish their own course. This often clashes with the style and branding of the platform, making the homepage look noisy and disorganized.

Another drawback to user generated content is the lack of quality control. The quality of courses on platforms like Udemy and Skillshare vary greatly. Some are great, but most aren’t worth your time. Unfortunately you’re left to figure out which courses are worth taking on your own.

Pricing for online learning platforms seem a bit erratic. Thinkful costs upwards of $30,000, but Career Foundry costs around £4000 for a course of similar length. It’s impossible to gauge the quality of the course based on pricing alone.

For the most part, content is delivered via text lessons and videos. Exercises are sometimes given to gauge understanding. Only the most expensive platforms like UX Design Institute, Thinkful, and Career Foundry offer 1 on 1 lessons and reviews. Without the element of human interaction the amount that you can learn is limited.

Something that I noted, which may be personal preference: Courses are really long. It’s understandable for the more expensive courses, which aim to emulate a university experience. However I would prefer to see a platform with a lot of smaller bite sized modules rather than one large course.

My Takeaways

Rather than a long, linear learning experience, I would prefer a non-linear or modular experience. Let me learn individual principles in bite sized modules and mix and match what I learn. I’m going to learn everything I can eventually, but let me do it in the order and time that I want.

A way to track a student’s progress through the content would be ideal. You could possibly do something like GitHub’s heatmap to show activity, as well as tracking problem areas. This would allow the platform to cater new content to the needs of the student, as well as allowing the student to visualize their progress. This is likely to improve a person’s ability to learn by at least 3000% (citation needed).

One thing I hate about online services is the sign up process. Especially if I’m just trying it out. I don’t want to give away my name and email if I’m not going to use your service longer than a day yo. We’re able to save user data with cookies nowadays, so the long sign up process can be set aside for another time. The ideal service would give me time to try it out before committing to it.

Community is tricky. I don’t think forums are the answer. Forums as a medium are kind of dying anyway. With services like Slack and Discord there’s no reason not to have some sort of chat function on the platform. Could we use an existing service like Slack to create a community? I mean yeah, we probably can.

I think allowing users to leave comments and reviews is good, but not in the way some platforms handle it. Mandatory reviews of courses leads to a Youtube-comments-esque level of drivel. I really like the way Duolingo does (used to?) handle this. After you answer any question you are able to leave a comment about the question. This leads to discussion on the topic or principle taught, and can help other people who come along later who are also struggling.