Community based E-Learning

Communities provide a space and a structure for people to align around a shared goal. Effective communities are both aspirational and practical. They connect people, organizations, and systems that are eager to learn and work across boundaries, all the while holding members accountable to a common agenda, metrics, and outcomes. These communities enable participants to share results and learn from each other, thereby improving their ability to achieve rapid yet significant progress.

• It connects people. Learning communities convene change agents across sectors, disciplines, and geographies to connect, share ideas and results, and learn from each other. Communities may work together in-person and virtually.
• It sets goals and measures collective progress. These communities align participants around common goals, metrics (ways of measuring achievement), theories of change, and areas of practice.
• It enables shared learning. Communities share learning from both successful and unsuccessful experiences to deepen collective knowledge.
• It supports distributed leadership. The scope of a learning community allows it to offer a wide range of leadership roles and skill-building opportunities.
• It accelerates progress toward impact at scale. These communities facilitate fast-cycle learning, measure results to understand what works for whom, and bring together the key stakeholders who can achieve systems-level change.

Designing a mobile-first feature that connects students online to facilitate peer-to-peer learning, support, feedback, and motivation through a community-driven approach.

Approach and Goal -

The goal of the web app is to enhance the learning experience of students by connecting them with peers who share similar interests and have varying experiences and insights.

Prioritizing “community”, “engagement”, and “education”. The platform should enhance the learning experience in a way that’s not distracting, overwhelming, or feels like work. The final solution should put student-generated content front and centre.

Insights -

• With colleges moving on zoom classes, the majority of students wanted to connect & socialise with like-minded people online.
• Most students are ambitious about their career choices & hence are curious to explore new skills & domains.
• People find it hard to navigate between multiple channels within the server.
• Members bond better when they interact with each other on VCs(voice channels). They also find it easier to interact on VCs than on text channels.
• With college/school commitments, it is hard for students to attend live classes hence they prefer structured recorded classes over them.

Key Findings — 👀

• Adding games like quizzes helps to understand the user’s interests and thus customising its feed.
• Adding leaderboards in the community section will develop a level of competition in the server.
• Spaces: General forum boards for sharing resources and knowledge via user posts; posts are tagged to help users find what they’re looking for.
• Study-rooms: Group chats that enable users to build a support network and collaborate with other students live; users can message other students, share files, and create polls.

Understanding business & user problem

What business value might the solution bring?

I kicked off the project with understanding the value of the solution. To do so, I tasked myself to answer below questions.

1. Does the market exist? What business value might the solution bring?

2. Market demand and size. What’s the likelihood of success of this feature?

3. Competitive landscape. Are there any other competitors in the market and where are they positioned?

4. Value Proposition. What’s the core value the feature provide ?

5. Business metrics. How to measure success?

Ideation — Low-fi wireframes

Profile Page

Here on I will be starting to give out my design solutions -

We’ve already learned from that getting to know people online and judging the trustworthiness of others are critical steps Calling out basic demographic info, the length of their involvements on the platform, paid identity, and similarities, mutual friends and networks, can largely help users make informed decisions.

I also added a feature — “appreciations”. These are real, authentic feedbacks from people, allowing users to judge others’ trustworthiness based on their past behaviours and feedback from others.

Paid and Unpaid user profile

There will be differences in features given to explore for paid and unpaid user.
for eg. In profile section a paid user can explore the accuracy of answers and and the time spent on the features. Given that both the factors would remain important for a user to earn points and avail benefits to buy paid courses and attend membership clubs.

Home Screen for Community

Our main goal for the home screen was to keep the existing users to be updated with the latest content while also help new users to discover content with personalized and curated content.

• The topmost carousel contains the personal achievements for existing user or top 5 acheivers of the week coming either from test prep papers or quiz or puzzles.
• Further, the content is organized via likes dislikes and followed by regions while showcasing the most-watched ones on the feed.
• By keeping personalised and curated content in mind, the users can also find the content similar to what they just watched or read in highlights.
• All the types of users would be shown clubs be it premium or free, Just that free users will have to subscribe to join the channels.
• Touch points to the main community home screen could be anywhere. It could either be triggered from hamburger, nav bar, cards to through main profile section.

Multi Use-Case Leaderboard Framework

Objective

The aim was to create a framework that could be used for games and other constructs. This would instigate competitive behavior. Real-time visibility and social proofing would add as an intangible reward to improve engagement.

The players would also get to see real-time rankings and scores of themselves and that of the top competitors.

The leaderboard would be acting as a means to bring extrinsic motivation. It is the kind of motivation that comes from outside us like money, grades, or praises. The players would feel this when comparing themselves with others.

Few Considerations -

Few things that have been and can be involved in the whole community feature for engagement can be -

- Leaderboard — We can create leaderboads based on their quiz or practice paper ranks. Colearn can put one active quiz for every cohort and the top 5 can be highlighted on the platofrm. Users would want to feature themselves and engage on the list.
- Streaks
- Social Profile — Students can achieve or unlock social profile points or special batches based on platform activities like, Join 7 classes in a week, attend practice test after class, weekly quizzes etc.
- Daily quiz
- Group study — Platform or users themselves can create a group of 4–5 students from there own cohort in which they can help each other live for there homeworks, assignments and doubts. Rarely teachers can also be involved.
Topics/ Subjects wise podcasts — Example like clubhouse
02. Feedback loop — Important for trust in community.

Feedback loop

Learning from best practices in rating system design.

Star ratings is typically used when comparing a variety of different objects, and that there are clear metrics to define what’s “good” or “bad” about the object. For example, a good product can be measured by metrics such as high quality, durability, etc. This rating system is better suited in a e-commerce environment, where products and services can be measured and compared.

Binary system, however, emphasizes on encouraging subjective opinions and genuine feedbacks. It gives the system flexibility to address extreme opinions and actions, while helps the community to build trust.

Revenue Generation and Success metrics

Initially, the revenue growth of community will be two-pronged. The first prong being user attention and growth. The main focus is user base acquisition and engagement within short period of time. Key business KPIs that measure the success of product design in this prong are:

Daily active user (DAU)
Time spent (per DAU)
Daily sessions per DAU
Churn rate
Retention rate

The second prong would be monetizing. These main revenue streams would be:
- advertising (for business accounts) Selling paid courses.
- data monetization
- analytics (for business)
- Subscription for being paid users and availing multiple premium sections.

Note : The UI and userflows designed above is basic, and through iterations can be polished and well done.