15 months in: what we’re upto
About 15 months ago, we started our journey of creating a social network for e-learners called Social MOOC Taker. The engagement levels in online education, especially MOOCs are low and people often drop out of online courses they opt in to. When you look at brick and mortar schools, graduates claim that the best part about school was their peer group and the friends they made. So to make online learning more engaging, we decided to create a platform that lets e-learners get more of the social element in addition to the amazing content they’re already getting from MOOCs and other resources. We brainstormed, validated, pivoted and finally piloted our product a few months ago! Here’s a short update of all that’s been going on:
1. We created a prototype that connects e-learners taking online courses to a small group of 10 people in the same course and lets them interact with each other as they go through the course.
2. We discovered that this was a great way to increase engagement in online learning and found that online course providers were really enthusiastic to use the product on their courses for their e-learners.
3. So we partnered an Iversity MOOC about Digital Marketing run by Aleksej Heinze and some other really accomplished professors. We got an amazing sign up rate from users (30%), but realised that we needed to work on improving the user experience of the product.
4. Now, we’re in the process of implementing a new UX to the app based on the feedback we got from users and opening it to more courses. We’re already in conversation with 5 course providers and aim to have 7 courses running on the app by the end of this month, which would mean 100s of new users to get feedback from!
Making development of the product happen quickly has been a challenge, but we’ve had the chance to work with some amazing developers that’s made our life so much easier!
We’re excited to see what users have to say about our product and we can’t wait to create an even better product with the help of our users!
Have any suggestions, want to use us for your course or just want to say hi? Reach out at hello@smoocer.com.
