Why People Not Finish Their Online Course? — A Case Study
Learning has evolved from the traditional classroom to distance learning and now to online learning, where students learn in “invisible classrooms”(Phillip, 1998; Sutherland, 1999)
Online course is all about self-pace. It means broad flexibility which is a privilege for urban worker who want to expand their knowledge. The method is cost-effective, learner-centered, time and location-flexible which makes it feasible for global audience (Nunamaker et al, 2004).
While it means a good thing, reality has shown that it also makes users tend to not finish courses. Based on research done by Katy Jordan average online courses’ completion rate is approximately 15%.
This project is an exploration about how we can improve the completion rate of online course.
We pick Skill Academy as our case study object. It is a new product launched by Ruang guru, which specialized in online education course in Indonesia. In this research we define the course is completed when the user opens all classes / videos and finish all exam.
The research was conducted as one of our final project tasks in Purwadhika UX Design Job Connector program. The team consisted of 3 people with different roles:
- UX Strategist & Information Architect: Muhammad Abizar Fahri (Me)
- User Researcher: Arnold Raharja
- UI Designer: Imantarigan
Research
The research conducted using design thinking method. We ran 3 sprints to finish our research and prototype. The goal is to identify some points:
- Find out what reason of people not completing their course
- Get insight what features that may needed to increase the completion rate
- Make solution that will also potentially profitable for business
- Find out what user felt with the existing application
Research is divided into two parts, usability research for existing Skill Academy app and user-centered research of online course users. The usability research goal is to identify pain points of current application (Skill Academy). The user-centered research goals is to see the reason why online course users tend to not finish their course and explore opportunity to increase the completion rate. Using data and some insight we defines the hypothesis to be validated: “People tend to not finish their course due to lack of motivation”
1st Research — Usability Research
Usability research is essential to understand what we need to do to improve the usability. We used Guerrilla Interview and Comparative Analysis methods.
Guerrilla Interview
The target of our respondents is a tech-savvy person who has experience using online courses and has knowledge related to UI/UX Design. We showed the current Skill Academy application to 5 people, as suggested by Nielsen Norman Group, and we collected some insights related to usability and interface problem.
To complete the usability research, we make comparative research. We compare the existing online course application which has many user in Indonesia.
Sketch, Prototype and Concept Testing
By the end of day we started to synthesize and make sketches to solve pain points related to the existing app’s user interface. Afterwards, we made the medium-fidelity wireframe using Figma to see how people respond with our new interface and flow.
We tested the wireframe to 5 people using think aloud method. In this phase, we changed one flow related purchase class. The complete report can be read here.
2nd Research — User-Centered Research
This is the challenging side of the research, understanding why people tend to not finish the online course. To learn more about the user’s goals and pain points, we held in-depth interviews with 5 people who used online learning services. I visualized number of keywords that form clues to user mind into affinity map
By talking with users, we felt that we gained firm understanding of their mindset and what kind of information needed to make them more productive in completing their course. The important point is many of them feel lazy to complete the course, which is in line with the hypothesis (Completion rate of online courses is low due to lack of motivation).
Exploration
Narrowing ideas for solutions, we used the “how might we” method to find what is our focus of problems that we need to solve. We agreed unanimously to choose “how might we make people complete more online courses?”. However, as we are restricted by time, we decide to implement our solutions into an Android mobile app design.
There are several ideas, such as course road-map, private tutoring, forum discussions, etc. We concluded that some options can be included as new features. Prioritization map made to using 2x2 metrics.
We analyzed difficulties then remove some options as it’s may not suitable.
Course Road-map : There is no standard of curriculum to make road-map
Certificate : Might caused much higher course prize
Private Tutoring : The tutor is not committed to platform, but we can add QnA / discussion features to accommodate the issue.
By filtering option problem statement made using gamification as our solution of the problem
“We can make people complete more online courses by implementing Gamification”.
While I want to insert all scope here, it feels very long and you may not want to read it completely, so I explain the gamification process in other story.
