The Dirty Little Secret of Online Courses
Write of Passage Cohort 4 officially kicked off Wednesday night! After a wind-sprint of marketing launch events we rounded out Cohort 4 with over 190 students. That includes 130 students joining us for the first time, and more than 60 WOP Premium members returning for another round.
We had 120 people on our opening call. Students joined from Argentina, Panama, Ireland, Russia, Germany, India, the UK, South Korea, Japan, Nigeria, Canada, Singapore...the list goes on. People in Europe and Africa braved 2am start times. Of course we also had people from dozens of cities in the US. This set a record for Write of Passage live session attendance (previous high was 99, first session of Cohort 3).
Earlier today one of our new students texted me with a question. He noticed that only 120 students showed up for the live session when nearly 200 paid for the class. Where was everyone else? This was my response:
Then I told him the “dirty little secret” of online courses:
Most people don't finish them.
At last count, the completion rate for MOOCs (massive open online courses) hovers between 5-15%. Other course platforms (Coursera, MasterClass) also post fairly low numbers. If online learning is the future, why are platforms struggling to keep students around?
Author and marketing guru Seth Godin explains this topic better than anyone else I’ve found. As the creator of the thriving AltMBA program, he has authority to speak here. Seth explains:
In order to become educated, you first must become incompetent. You first must become ignorant. Because that’s what education is, confronting something you don’t know. And in the face of “I don’t know that”, that’s scary.
And you’re about to have to do work, which is also scary. And if there isn’t a prize at the end (degree, job), you say “I don’t want to do work, I don’t want to be afraid. See ya.” As soon as MOOC courses get hard, people disappear.
Seth frames it well: true learning always requires you to feel uncomfortable as you face the unknown. To become smarter, you must first feel uncertain, confused, even dumb. Not a pleasant feeling. What happens when you combine these challenges with no compliance requirement, no diploma, and no peer group? People start to quit. When feeling stuck, it’s so easy just to close your laptop.
David and I have thought about this problem since we started prepping for Cohort 3 last October. Despite having 100+ students enrolled each time, average attendance in Cohorts 1 and 2 kicked around the 50s and 40s before settling in the mid-30s. Cohort 3 improved to ~65 live participants for the first three weeks, and closer to 45 students per session after Thanksgiving break.
That number should be higher. Lately we’ve been obsessed with improving student retention throughout the five weeks of Write of Passage. People won’t grow from the course if they’re not present. But as outlined above, it’s not an easy problem to solve. Attending eleven classes at 90 minutes each is no small ask. So what’s the solution?
Our answer: build a stronger community.
We believe people quit when they’re anonymous. It’s easy to stop showing up when nobody knows you’re gone. That’s why we’re so focused on making students feel welcome. Last month we outlined an eight-point plan to improve the sense of community in Cohort 4. I’ve already talked about rolling out feedback groups. Other changes include a new course forum, an “Initiation Week”, and forming an alumni mentor team. You can see a complete list of changes in our Write of Passage version notes.
Better community also requires a mindset shift. When I first started helping with Write of Passage, David’s favorite word was “scale”. He wanted all of our work to be streamlined and repeatable with an eye toward growth. Maximum efficiency and effectiveness with minimum effort. Then, we found this video.
In the clip, 31-year-old billionaire Patrick Collison talks about founding Stripe, the titanic virtual payment platform. Collison agrees that conventional wisdom says to scale. He then calls that approach “completely and utterly misguided.” Instead of pursuing scale in the early days, Stripe focused exclusively on maximizing customer happiness. They manually built complicated products for single clients. They hand-wrote thank-you notes for thousands of customers. For their first few years, every customer support email went to every employees’ inbox.
Collison’s speech changed our mindset. Rather than pursuing scale above all else, we shifted to maximizing student happiness. Our community-building changes align with this goal. But we also added one final piece to the mix: intro calls.
During Cohort 3 I held over 70 intro Zoom calls with new students. I asked about their background, their goals for the course, and answered any questions they had. For Cohort 4 my goal is to hold a 15 minute intro call with all 130 new students. I’m at 27 so far. They’re fun, since I get to talk with fascinating people from around the globe. They’re helpful, too, as we get to learn about our students and clarify any questions. But most importantly, intro calls show that we care. We make students feel welcome, rather than anonymous, in the early weeks. It's our bet that combining these calls with our community-building efforts will create strong enough ties to keep people active and learning through the March 25th finish line.
Here’s to beating the “dirty little secret” one friendship, feedback group, and phone call at a time.