Comment by kobiguru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kobiguru | Hacker News Reader

Hi David,

I browsed your website and it looks really nice. Beautifully designed. I have been in the education business for close to nine years and still fascinating to see so many innovations. I have a few questions and maybe some suggestions.

1. Async model (Moocs) has been known for low completion rate while instructor-led cohort courses aren't scalable for large firms, how have you tried to solve this problem besides the community angle? ( I have thought about this and want to see how you have approached the issue)

2. How is the completion rate in passive learning scenarios like a corporate onboarding/training as opposed to a university class in Eduflow?

3. have you tried running classes, I saw that you have templates have you have used them yourself how has been your feedback?

Not sure if you already do but it would be great to have a course dashboard with graphs along with the tables. A simple kanban board for the student and a teacher for easier course management. Lastly, give API access to the firm that could connect their internal tools or other no-code tools to EduFlow and give more contextual programmes.

Disclaimer-Take everything I say with a giant pile of salt. This is just after some cursory look and I obviously don't know anything about Eduflow other than what I saw for a few minutes on your website.

Great questions and comments. I will try to comment on as much as possible.

1. I guess this is what we hope we can find a solution for with Eduflow. Pure self-led learning is not very motivating to most. Learning together with others is a great source of motivation, but this often ends up resulting in endless Zoom calls. So we try to balance this by allowing async social things. Examples of this could be peer reviews or something simpler like discussion activities. We also support setting things up like matching people in groups, and then having groups meet regularly, basically studying together.

2. I think it depends too much on the specific course. Generally the completion rate can be extremely high because there is an external pressure to complete. If you are going through corporate onboarding or taking a university course with a grade, then you are quite likely to complete all activities. In end, we are not in charge of the actual course designs, just the tool that enables instructors to deliver it. So we see everything from 1% to 100% completion rates.

3. We are currently running a course called Instructional Design Principles for Course Creation (https://www.eduflow.com/academy/instructional-design-princip...) on Eduflow. This is going well, and I think the places where we could improve is probably more about the actual content of the course (it was a bit too intensive for some learners). Before building Eduflow I taught data science with peer review (using Peergrade), and that was a pretty good success!

4. We are actually working on adding a bunch of dashboards to Eduflow right now. It is not just something instructors are asking for - it is also one of the most popular requests from larger customers. We offer an API already (https://docs.eduflow.com/) which gives access to data in Eduflow and manipulation. We also support Zapier which is pretty popular, especially for smaller customers.

Hope this is somewhat useful, otherwise you can just let me know and I will try to elaborate :).

Thank you for your response, David. I want to dig a little deeper on point 1.

You are using social accountability, be it online or in-person (office setting), to improve the completion rate. I am sure they have worked well for the clients you work with. Here are the few ways I have tried for corporate clients and have seen the completion rate increase in most cases

1. The candidate has to pay a high entry fee (for example USD 1000) and whatever percentage of the course they complete beyond the minimum 60%, they get that percentage of their fee refunded. So if someone finishes the entire course, the course is free for him and if someone does only half or less of the course they pay the full fee. The client then donates the money on the candidate's behalf to a partner NGO.

2. Another is a reward at every level. I don't have enough evidence to say these words, as I tried only once.

3. Course completion is tied to performance metrics but it has to be done with care because the goal is learning rather than a certificate.

4. Displaying % completed for the entire cohort (which can have side effects but is a good motivation device and can contribute towards social accountability.

I did these experiments by combining different tools but my case isn't representative of anything in the industry. So I must repeat take everything I say with a kilo of salt.

Interesting! All of those things make sense, and combining a bunch of incentives and gamification elements like this is probably the way to super-charge completion.

On the contrary, I am a bit skeptical personally about the long-term effects of adding gamification to everything we do. In the end, intrinsic motivation is the strongest force, and I worry (mostly on a personal level) that so much pressure on external motivating factors will make us immune eventually.

In Peergrade, we had a small amount of built-in gamification like this. We would show you how much feedback you had provided compared to the class average. This led to fairly significant improvements in both feedback amounts and quality.

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