Community, learning and the 7Ps

How building communities can improve engagement, acquisition and understanding learner needs. Plus, introducing the EdTech Fellowship community.

EdTech has a problem with going direct-to-consumers.

Learning experiences are often transient. They are something that people turn to in a moment of transition or need. And once they are completed, there is often no strong reason to return.

This means that the cost of acquisition can easily end up as much or bigger than the lifetime value, unless you charge high prices. It’s not uncommon for 50% of the income from an online degree to go towards marketing.

This is why many EdTech businesses pivot towards selling to businesses, as well as, or instead of consumers.

The consumer business becomes a way to build the brand and credibility, whilst the real money is made by selling seats to corporates. This offers a one off acquisition cost, a potentially endless supply of learners and the promise of monthly recurring revenue. Even if these learners are typically less engaged.

Coursera, Udemy, General Assembly, Reforge, OpenClassrooms, Busuu to name but a few, all started as direct to consumer but now have significant B2B businesses.

However, there is a less explored way of keeping learners engaged and reducing acquisition costs that also works nicely with the grain of learning.

I’m talking about community.

Learning and community

Post learning and continued engagement

When people ‘finish’ a learning experience, there is desire to retain and cement whatever has been learned and try and put into practice. This often requires support.

Learners generally want ongoing access to materials they can refer back to (although they seldom do). This is one expression of the idea of not wanting to forget. I would recommend giving people access to resources for as long as possible, potentially even as part of your value proposition. We did this at FutureLearn as part of our upgrade package.

If they have taken part in a cohort experience, they generally also have a desire to keep in touch and continue to seek support form their peers. Someone in my recent cohort described the desire to meet back up as like a prenatal ‘NCT’ group where you want a reunion “to compare babies!”

From a learning point of view, finding ways to support your learners to put into practice what they have learned is a way for you to create more impact for them.

This is likely to turn them into greater advocates as the transition that you have help them achieve is more dramatic and you remain more regularly in the front of their mind.

And if you are able to keep them engaged, you gain a better understanding of their needs and can spot opportunities to provide them with additional value and new products and services.

Pre learning and acquisition

There is are also opportunities pre-learning. Communities help you to attract people that might be interested in your learning experiences but are not yet ready to commit.

In the OpenClassrooms case study I recently shared, Guillaume their senior director of strategy shared that many of OpenClassroom’s paying learners start by exploring potential new careers by taking part in free open courses on the topic.

Meeting folks that have taken part in programmes can also be a powerful conversation technique if the majority of your learners enjoyed the experience you offer.

If you are generous and provide value to your potential audience, you build trust and authority. This means that you are likely to be the people that they turn to when they are ready to commit to a more intensive experience.

Pre product-market fit

Communities are also a useful way to really understand a group of people with the same interests, problems or sense of purpose.

If you can bring people together to engage in activities that are valuable to them, it will help you understand opportunities for you to create products that meet their needs in a very deep way. It makes customer research easy and authentic.

In my case study on Springboard, Parul Gupta, their cofounder shared how they started out as a search engine and community for MOOCs. Then they built ‘learning paths’. And then, because they had built a rich understanding of their audience and their needs, they found real traction by offering ‘career tracks’, that added mentoring and a job guarantee.

Raspberry Pi did something similar as they built an online replacement for their school based Code Clubs that the pandemic had suddenly and dramatically curtailed.

Creating a moat

One final important piece to note. Building an engaged and active community is hard. But if you can do it, it is hard for others to replicate. Which makes the position you are building easier to defend.

Introducing The EdTech fellowship

This thinking has been very much in my mind recently has I have begun to explore how to build on the early success of my Finding Product-Market Fit in EdTech programme.

I now have over 40 alumni who are expressing a clear desire for continued support and to keep in touch with their peers and access a wider community.

I currently spend zero on marketing. All of my learners come via word of mouth and LinkedIn. But recruiting a cohort is hard work. Work that could be better spent providing more value to a broader audience.

That’s why I’m starting to build a community offer, alongside cohort-based programmes. The goal is to provide ongoing value and support to my growing base of alumni, as well as value to a wider audience who will help create network effects and, perhaps, one day will be interested in joining a cohort.

I’m going to be doing this alongside Marion Trigodet, who was a member of my second cohort and who has been running a community for EdTech product managers, EdTech Circle. Marion was Head of Learning Design at OpenClassrooms and Tomorrow’s University and brings a complimentary learning design skillset and continental European dimension to what I offer. You will be hearing from Marion as a guest contributor to this newsletter soon.

To explain what we’ll be offering in more detail, I thought it might be helpful to do with one of the frameworks that we explore in my course: David Spinks’ 7Ps of community.

The 7Ps of EdTech Fellowship

David recommends mapping out your community design and being intentional in your approach.

He suggests that there are common fundamental elements, the 7Ps:

1. People: Who the program is focused on

2. Purpose: Why they need this program

3. Place: Where members will gather

4. Participation: What members will do

5. Policy: Guidelines and rules that will shape the experience

6. Promotion: How members will learn about the program

7. Performance: What success looks like

Let’s bring these to life through our intent for the EdTech Fellowship.

1. People

Having spoken to many of my alumni and members of the EdTech Circle, we’ve decided to bring together people we call Learning Changemakers. These include EdTech founders and leaders, product managers, learning designers and people in established organisations driving transformation.

We think this group has a shared sense of purpose but is diverse and broad enough to make the conversation interesting. This has certainly been my experience of the cohorts who have taken part in my course.

2. Purpose

We believe this shared sense of purpose is creating new transformational learning experiences. This group are often doing a unique role in their organisation and looking for external support and inspiration. One of the biggest insights that came out of our research is a desire to find somewhere to explore this stuff with others and not feel alone.

3. Place

The community lives both online and in person.

My courses are already delivered online to international cohorts via a community platform called Circle and a delightful online workshop tool called Butter. These will continue to be the place where the community gathers online.

I’ve also run a number of in person meet ups for alumni in rooms-above-a-pub in London. These will continue with a broader invite list. Marion is based in Berlin and intends to kick off a local group there. As we grow, perhaps we’ll add more cities to the mix.

Most of the early members of the community are based in Europe, which we also believe might be an interesting differentiator to the various US communities that exist and alongside reflecting Europe’s distinctive culture in education.

4. Participation

We’re offering two tiers:

1. Community

2. Cohort-based courses

We’ll be co designing the community offer with our members but from our initial research the kinds of activities we intend to enable are:

• Sharing challenges, getting support and external perspectives

• Sharing case studies, resources and artefacts of what works for building learning products

Our cohort-based courses include:

• Self-paced learning

• Workshops with small cohorts to apply concepts and methods

• Peer intros and mentoring

• 1:1 coaching

5. Policy

Our primary aim is to create a network of people where there is a genuine sense of connection and support.

We’re not interested in creating a Slack group with thousands of anonymous faces or just putting money behind a bar and letting people get on with it.

We want to help people that want to make a difference create an impact and feel that they have a group of people that they can turn to for support when they are trying to do hard things for the first time.

6. Promotion

So far, our primary channel has been LinkedIn. Follow me and Marion and you’ll see us posting things that we think will benefit the wider community.

This Substack newsletter is also a channel. Please recommend it to folks you think would be interested!

7. Performance

We’ll based our performance on engagement in the various activities we offer. Our primary metric of success is not the volume of people but how better supported and more confident people feel having taken part in what we offer.

Hopefully, this is both a helpful example of the 7Ps in practice and an insight into our plans for the fellowship.

Start small

David’s final piece of advice that I heartily endorse is to start small. He suggests 10-50 members to begin with.

We’ll be taking this approach. There are just over 40 founding alumni from my programme, who I’m giving free access to and we are giving Beta access to 10 of the most keen members of the EdTech Circle.

We’ll grow it slowly in order to find the most valuable activities and ensure the sense of connection that is so important to us and our members.

If you’re interested in becoming part of this awesome group, we’ve started a waiting list. Sign up to be the first to join and come with us on this exciting journey!

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Marion's new course Designing Efficient Learning in the AI Era starts 18 June.

Cohort 5 of my Finding Product-Market Fit in EdTech starts w/b 3 June.

I’m also developing a new programme on Building and Empowering Cross-functional Teams to begin in the autumn.