The Learner Journey
By: Rahma Atallah
Tags: Surveys, Education, Educational Technology, Technology, Edtech

Online courses are a journey on which learners willingly embark to empower themselves with valuable knowledge, so they may secure the personal, professional and academic success they aspire for.

It is not an easy journey. Will power & motivation are a must in order to reach the final destination — The success of completion.

Learners undergo several stages to complete an online course or specialization. As MOOC providers, we work hand-in-hand to help them reach this final destination.

Education providers can best support learners by keeping their needs and challenges at the forefront. When I entered the world of online learning at Edraak, it was clear that understanding learners inside out was the first step towards delivering personalized products with great end value.

When learners engage in online learning, their video viewership, assessment activity, and course surveys leave a trail of data, which educators can use to derive insights on their needs, challenges, and product satisfaction rate.

One way of doing this is to study learners’ activity data, which is stored in platform databases such as basic demographics, video and exercise activity. While this data lends a general overview, it still leaves many questions unanswered. For example, video engagement might tell us which topics a learner is interested in, but it won’t convey their real purpose for enrolling in a course. Low performance on a particular exercise shows us that learners are struggling at a certain point, but it doesn’t inform us what went wrong along the learning journey. There are other important open questions, like: How did they feel about the course structure design? Did they enjoy the activities? Is there something missing they want us to add in the future?

The most common practice to gather insights is surveys. However, a survey won’t deliver strategic insights unless designed and embedded carefully. At this juncture, we decided to assemble forces from different teams to determine:

The questions that uncover learner needs and goals.

The optimal way for an online learning platform to design and present surveys to obtain the most reliable feedback from learners.

The reporting mechanism of survey data.

The value of the answers returned to different teams.

Survey design

Which key insights should online educators look for?

To deliver substantial value to learners, we concluded the following insights were needed to map the learner journey:

Demographics: Understanding who our learners are by gathering data on their age, gender, occupation, and professional level enables us to cater better to our audience personas.

Understanding who our learners are by gathering data on their age, gender, occupation, and professional level enables us to cater better to our audience personas. Brand value and perception: Do learners trust the Edraak brand? What do they expect from it? What do they appreciate about the platform?

Do learners trust the Edraak brand? What do they expect from it? What do they appreciate about the platform? Drivers and goals: What are learners’ intentions and objectives? Why are they joining Edraak specifically?

What are learners’ intentions and objectives? Why are they joining Edraak specifically? Content satisfaction and experience: Are learners interacting with the different features on the platform? How do they rate the content quality?

Are learners interacting with the different features on the platform? How do they rate the content quality? Challenges and behaviors: Gaining insights on the platform learner experience, preferred learning styles, most-used features, etc.

Gaining insights on the platform learner experience, preferred learning styles, most-used features, etc. Outcomes (impact): To what extent do our courses help learners achieve their goals? Was their motivation/driver fulfilled? What real-life impact did Edraak have? What did Edraak help them achieve? (though we kept this for the future) .

Silent caveats!

Survey experts recognize the array of factors involved in survey design and that the methods through which responses are collected can affect their validity. Previously at Edraak, we embedded one survey at the beginning of the course and one at the end. This caused numerous issues:

Pre-course surveys led to misleading results as learners had not yet experienced the content.

Post-course surveys introduced a bias in results, as respondents were typically interested in the course. This meant we were missing out on those who dropped out and understanding their reasons for doing so.

How did we solve this issue?

We did something rather unusual. We designed a four-split survey to be filled in at the beginning of the course, at the end of week one, mid-way through the course and, lastly, upon its completion. After putting a lot of thought into this, we figured this was the best way to attain an overview of learners’ behaviors and course satisfaction.

Split 1:

To be placed after the first video in unit 1.

This group of questions focuses on learners’ demographics and motivations/goals.

This split targets all course learners before anyone drops out and seeks to gather information on their main goals and reasons for enrolling in order to measure their fulfillment at the end of the course.

Split 2:

To be placed at the end of week 1 in unit 1.

This group of questions focuses on learners’ experiences and satisfaction with the course content and features.

This split targets learners who have viewed enough of the course content to evaluate it. Since the dropout rate usually increases after week 1, it is imperative that we gain insights from the largest number of learners regarding the course content and features.

Split 3:

To be placed midway through the course.

This group of questions focuses on learners’ challenges, behaviors, and satisfaction, as well as on their perception of the brand value.

This split targets learners who are interested in the course and have formed a good overview of the course strengths and weaknesses. This split contains many open-ended questions as the input from learners at this stage is highly beneficial.

Split 4:

To be placed towards the end of the course.

This group of questions focuses on learners’ overall satisfaction with the course and platform, as well as gauges their willingness to enroll in other Edraak courses.

This split secures insights on learners’ overall course experience and can be linked to the previous splits to assess which learning goals were met or missed.

Tough-To-Design Questions:

As usual in surveys, we faced some difficulty designing questions for various reasons, such as the sensitivity of information. For example, we wanted to ask about the size of the company the learners worked at but were concerned that adding ‘small company’ as an option might cause some discomfort. Another concern was using words like small, medium, and large as they are subjective and might not yield reliable results.

How did we solve this? We designed answer options as per the below:

1–5 employees

6–20 employees

21–50 employees

51–500 employees

500+ employees

Visualization

Since the survey reports were meant as references, we decided to adopt an easy-to-understand infographic data visualization style using Google Data Studio. After blending data from the four splits, reports were produced for each course that contained the embedded surveys.