Are Micro Community Courses the future of online education?
By Alen Faljic
I still remember when I bought my first online course. It was advertised as a super-premium experience with great content and a community of students. I trusted the claims because it was created by a famous blogger, whom I followed for a while.
At the time, I was still a student so spending $1500 on a course was a huge investment. I badly wanted this course to work. I needed it to work. I just spent half of my savings on it.
But when the course started I felt scammed.
The content was well prepared but there was no interaction. There was very little structure. And there was definitely no feedback to know if you are on the right path. Halfway through, I got frustrated and I never finished the course.
After a few similar experiences, I sourly realized that most online courses are nothing more than content locked behind a paywall.
Something that could easily be a book or a series of videos on YouTube. And that still seems to be the norm in the online education industry? Why?
A few years later, when designing my online course, I found the reason.
I figured out that most online courses follow a course design, which is fundamentally broken. It is based on the Massive Open Online Course model (MOOCs). These courses are designed to educate a huge amount of students, which comes at the expense of interaction and paradoxically learning itself.
MOOCs have a median completion rate of just 12.6%. Even adding a paywall, does not solve the problem. Research shows that less than half of students, who pay for MOOCs, finish them. Can you really learn something if you don’t finish a course and engage with it?
Would you buy a product that works for only 12 out of 100 who use it?
If online courses are poorly designed, why have they become so popular? To students, MOOCs offer more convenience and lower cost than traditional education. To educators, it offers an unbelievably attractive business model with infinite scalability. You prepare a course once and, in theory, millions of people can buy it without your additional input.
This has attracted the wrong people to the industry. From what I see, most online educators care more about profit than impact.
The saddest part? Students get the short end of the stick. We spend our money and time on courses where odds are stacked against us. Would you buy a computer that works for only 1 in 10 customers?
But is there a better alternative?
Online education is not about selling content. It is about making an impact.
When I started the d.MBA, I blindly followed the broken model. In the absence of better archetypes, most people end up copying what is already out there. I did the same.
My first product was an email course. I created it for designers who wanted to raise their business literacy. It was a really simple and highly scalable product. I prepared a sequence of emails that were sent out when somebody bought the course. Each subsequent day, a student would receive an email introducing another business concept. All automatically.
When I launched the course, I got overwhelmingly positive feedback. The design community was looking for exactly this content. I sold many more licenses than I expected. I even got great feedback on the product itself. But something quickly felt wrong.
Initially, I received many questions from the students of the email course. But most interaction stopped just a few days after they started receiving emails. Why?
I reached out to students to figure out what was happening. It turned out they stopped paying attention to the email course. The novelty factor wore off and they moved to something else.
I was confused. Why were people buying the email course if they were not using it? Where has the initial excitement gone?
It turns out that this is a common problem. We buy books that we never read. We buy online courses that we never finish or implement. We buy running shoes that we rarely put on. The purchase itself makes us feel better.
After some reflection, I realized that as an online educator, I should not be creating courses. I should be striving for impact. It is not about the content I provide. It is about the impact I have on students' lives.
So, I set on a journey to design an online education that has an impact.
How do you design an impactful education program?
When starting any design project, we first need to define the goal? What are we trying to achieve? In education, the goal is impact. If you are a car instructor, impact means teaching someone to drive. If you are university, impact means preparing someone for career. The specific impact of educational program depends on what it is teaching.
The question that immediately follows is: how do you know if you are achieving the goal? This brings us to the metrics. How should we measure the success of online education?
What is the best metric to measure success, and hence, the impact of educational programs?
Should we measure it with sales? Well, my email course example clearly shows that revenue is far from a good predictor of impact. Many other commercially successful courses have the same problem. Sales do not show how many students used the content.
Should we measure it with student satisfaction? This is better than sales but it still has an issue. How do you assess a survey if most students haven’t finished your course? Do you send a survey just to those who have completed it? What does student satisfaction measure? Content satisfaction? Structure satisfaction? How is this a reliable metric?
What about the completion rate? That feels like a much better metric. It signals how many students found the course impactful enough to finish it. On the other hand, it still doesn’t exactly tell us what impact it had on students’ lives.
Another metric I considered are student stories. I could ask students how they implemented their knowledge and what the results are. Even though this is a qualitative metric, it reveals the impact and informs how you can improve a course. However, talking to every student a few months after the course is time-consuming, improbable (how will you get hold of all your students?), and too late (we want fast feedback so that our iteration cycles are shorter). If none of these metrics is right, what should we measure?
It seems that following just one metric can be a really harmful way of measuring a product. It is super easy to over-optimize for one goal and create problems somewhere else.
After a few years of experiments, together with the d.MBA team, we settled on a combination of three metrics:
Student ratings - How satisfied are students with the course?
Completion rate - How many students finish the course?
Alumni stories - What have alumni achieved as a result of taking a course?
Bye MOOCs. Hi MiCCs - Micro Community Courses!
How do you design a program that leads to impact? After spending three years researching this topic and experimenting with our program, we have some answers and positive results.
The d.MBA has a 90%+ completion rate, 9+ student rating, and a collection of student stories collected by our alumni community and alumni podcasts.
It seems to us that the principles behind the d.MBA could be a new model for online education. We call it the Micro Community Course. It consists of seven levers that explain what MiCC is and how you can build one.
The Micro Community Course consists out of seven levers across three building blocks: Community, Culture, Content.
Update (July 2021): Cohort-based courses (CBC) is a new name that has emerged for this category of online education. However, many courses that classify as CBC have big cohorts (100+ students), which goes against the idea of community learning. MiCC’s focus is on keeping the cohorts rather small to enable strong connections among students and mentors.
1. Community
1.1 Motivated Students
Motivation is the single most important factor in determining students' success. A highly motivated student is more likely to endure the transformational process necessary to create an impact. But how do you find motivated students?
We need to talk to them. For example, we have a strict application process to join the d.MBA. You can’t just freely enroll in the d.MBA program. You need to show your motivation. We ask every potential d.MBA student to fill out an application form. Those who are a good fit for the program are invited to an application call where we double-check their motivation and familiarity with the program.
You can’t just freely enroll in the d.MBA program. You need to show your motivation.
The application process is a huge time and resource investment but absolutely crucial for an impactful course. In a micro community course, every student is co-creating the experience for everybody else and the application process helps us curate it.
Setting a healthy tuition fee is another crucial step. On one side, it ensures that students have some skin in the game, which better aligns the motivation of students and online educators. On the other side, it helps an online educator invest in good content and mentors. Due to the lower cost structure, MCCs still have a much lower tuition fee than in-person training. For example, d.MBA’s tuition fee is somewhere around 2-5% of a regular MBA program. Free is not always the best option.
1.2 Intimate Community
Once you find motivated students, you need to create the right environment. As the name already suggests, Micro Community Courses pursue to create an intimate environment in small groups.
From our experience, students find it easier to go through a process if they are not in it alone. The community provides positive peer pressure, social accountability, and unexpected learning opportunities. We observe that students learn from each other as much as they learn from the course material.
Intimate community is small by definition. Our experiments show that a size of between 20 and 50 students provides variety and intimacy.
Intimate communities are small by definition. We’ve seen some companies selling community courses with several hundred students enrolled. Huge groups defeat the purpose of community learning. You lose the sense of a group if it is too large. Based on our experiments, a cohort of around 20 to 50 students is a good size to provide enough variety in the group but still makes it feel intimate. The exact number depends on the format (individual vs group work, etc.) and program’s culture.
2. Culture
2.1 Clear Structure
Most open-ended online courses lack the structure. That is why most of us never finish them. “I’ll do it tomorrow” is the beginning of so many unfinished projects.
Most online courses sell the “do it at your own pace” as a feature. We think it is a bug.
Inspired by traditional offline education, the d.MBA has a start and an end date. Paradoxically, that makes it easier to fit a program into our busy lives. We all want some predictability. How long will it take to master this? When am I ready to move on?
We also set clear deadlines. For example, each Sunday is an assignment submission deadline. This ensures that the d.MBA cohorts move through the program together, d.MBAers can help each other, and benefit from group discussions.
As most d.MBAers are working full-time while taking our program, we give everybody two wildcards. If they have a busy week in the office or family emergency they can postpone deadlines twice. However, the third time it happens, they are excluded from the community. This may seem harsh but when a student enrolls in an MiCC, they get responsibilities too. MiCCs are an intimate experience and students are expected to contribute actively in the community.
It is important to be upfront about the structure and its implications. We explain the structure to every applicant in our application process. Some are extremely excited and some get turned off and decide not to join. In a way, this supports our quest to find highly motivated students.
2.2 Positive Reinforcement
How do we ensure that students follow the structure and finish the course? It may seem that the structure is enough but our experiments show a different story.
In one of the first d.MBA cohorts, we did not have any positive reinforcement. If students were late with their assignment, we just told them to finish it later. As you can imagine, in many cases assignments never got done. Students started falling behind the program and eventually dropped out.
Local meetup, where students meet in real life, can be a great positive reinforcement of an online educational program.
As positive reinforcement, we introduced an alumni community, which includes d.MBAers from all intakes. So, if students finish the program on time, they join an alumni community that offers a whole list of activities: a book club, alumni podcast where d.MBAers share their stories, monthly Q&A calls, local meetups, monthly newsletter, venture design group, etc.
We see that d.MBAers are excited by the opportunity to meet others who have gone through the same experience and build their network.
2.3 Constructive Feedback
Most online courses shy away from providing feedback. It takes time. It is hard work. And it affects course scalability.
If you have just one mentor, and a hundred students, that mentor won’t be able to provide high-quality feedback. It is just impossible.
However, it turns out that feedback is fundamentally crucial to every learning experience. After every d.MBA intake, we do extensive research with our students. A recurring theme is the importance of feedback. Students crave feedback that would help them grow.
So, we decided to double down on the feedback and invest in it. In the d.MBA, we provide feedback on two fundamental levels.
First, there is peer feedback. Each d.MBAer provides feedback to two other students weekly. The peer feedback is usually more valuable to the person providing the feedback than the one getting it. By providing the feedback, they learn how they could have done their project differently.
Peer feedback is another opportunity for students to reflect upon their work and see what they can improve in their projects.
Secondly, we provide mentor feedback. Every week, our mentors host a Reflection Call, where they share how a professional business designer would approach this challenge. Mentors also read assignments from all d.MBAers and share some of the most illustrative examples with the whole group.
3. Content
3.1 Safe Sandbox
Have you ever read a book and felt like you have mastered a new skill? Only to realize you still have no idea once you tried to apply it. It’s a common problem.
Reading a book or watching a video does not lead to mastering a new skill. Practice does.
Education needs to create a safe space to practice, not just consume content. Today, access to information is a commodity.
In the d.MBA, we introduced real-world case studies, so students can learn by doing, and apply their newly acquired business knowledge close to reality.
Knowledge application is the hardest part of the learning experience. Mentor support is crucial here. For example, we organize weekly Q&A calls where students can get their questions answered.
At the end of each module, students share their solutions with the cohort. So, every student can see what others have done. It’s amazing how much learning happens through community exposure. Seeing how somebody else approached the same challenge provides another great learning opportunity.
3.2 Great Content
You might be asking why is content last on this list?
Most online educators believe that content is the most important. In reality, content is a hygiene factor. Don’t get me wrong. Content needs to be great.
However, good content without a good structure is like a good car engine without wheels. It won’t get students anywhere.
Great content can come in many different forms. It can be very specific and detailed. It can be a good summary of dozens of books and frameworks. It can be highly actionable for a specific target group. It can be something new. In short, it shouldn’t be something that a student can easily read in a book. As the creator, you have to add additional value.
Secondly, the content needs to be well explained. As an expert in the field, you might already know too much. It is very important to practice empathy. A great question I found helpful is: How might we provide just the right level of detail so our students learn enough to feel confident to explore further on their own? We want to provide enough information so they can start practicing and get confident. If we give them confidence, the rest will follow.
In the d.MBA, we focus on the very specific needs of designers. We know that design schools do not teach business literacy at all. We make sure that we cover business skills relevant to designers and skip the rest (accounting, macroeconomics, microeconomics, etc.).
We also recognized that most designers have some level of aversion against the business community. So, we try to present the ethical side of business. Our case studies feature companies that show examples of thoughtful business leadership. This helps us show that business skills can be used to drive a positive impact in society, not just for the company’s stakeholders. To further support this message, we try to run d.MBA the same. Our motto is: impact over profit.
It’s time to change how online education is done.
Each industry is built on a dominant design. Until its weaknesses are exposed and a superior alternative is presented. Feature phones were dominant until smartphones came along. Video rental was dominant until on-demand streaming services came along. Building websites by code was dominant until Wordpress and Squarespace came along.
The online education industry has been dominated by a poorly designed format, MOOCs, for far too long. It’s time we come up with a better alternative. An alternative that will have a real impact on the students' lives.
Micro Community Courses is one way how we can achieve that. Join us.