If you’re familiar with the Indian EdTech space, chances are that you’ve heard of Growth School, The Product Folks, GrowthX, Stoa and Invact. These are arguably 5 of India’s most promising educational companies.
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All 5 companies cater to widely different audiences. They have very different product offerings and demographics. Yet, there is one thread that binds them together and enables them to stand apart from their competitions.
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Completion Rates for LMS based Courses
Completion Rates for Community based Courses
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Growth School: Community-led live learning platform, Growth School announced that is has raised $5 million in funding round led by Sequoia Capital India and Owl Ventures.
GrowthX: GrowthX raises $1.5 Million the largest ever community-led seed round with 212 investors. This includes founders & leaders across companies like Razorpay, Airbnb, Meesho etc.
Not making much sense? Let me explain.
I approached this in the form of a mini-case study and formed a hypothesis and then later on, interviewed core-members of these start-ups to validate my hypothesis.
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In 2023 you'll be able to find an online course on just about any subject ranging from digital marketing to something as niche as quantum electro-dynamics.
Not only will you learn from world class universities and expert instructors, this information is completely accessible for free!
Despite content being freely available, completion rates for content-based courses are not seeing more than a 15% completion rate. The onus of completion relies solely on the learner and their personal motivations.
A student community alongside your course-content engages the learner in a social experience that gives rise to accountability. Moreover, when the course is not self-paced, the learner is time-boxed to complete the course in a certain duration and completion rates naturally go up leading to higher retention.
Let’s now take a look at how these 5 promising start-ups are running their courses and what roles content and community play in their ‘big-pictures’.
LMS : Stands from Learning Management System. It’s basically a content library for your course content - you can upload videos, documents, assignments, blogs, all sorts of content.
Community : In the context of this case study, a community refers to the social aspect of an online course. It’s that online space where students interact with each other to simulate a real-classroom like experience. After all, learning is social.
Let’s begin with a quick one-line intro to what each of these e-learning start-ups offer.
Learn from the top 1%. Educational programs to help you start, transition or level-up your career.
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Join the world’s most passionate product community. A volunteer-driven community of Product Managers and enthusiasts.
Become the top 1% growth leader. GrowthX members are founders, growth, product & marketing leaders, from the top product companies in the world.
The future of education is here. Learn from top industry experts and get placed in high-growth startups in growth marketing and product roles.
Earn your Stoa Level, be in demand. Get all the benefits of a traditional MBA, at a fraction of the time and cost.
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Now, I want you to think of what a college experience comprises; to put simply, it’s a combination of an academic + social life.
On one hand you have your lectures, assignments and course books and on the other, you have your friends, college clubs and social events. Let’s be honest, the social life made all the difference in how you experienced college. Chances are that it made the experience all the more fun and enjoyable alongside the tedious academic life.
If one translates both these aspects into the online world, an LMS takes care of the ‘academic’ part and a community takes care of the ‘social/interactive’ part.
All of these 5 start-ups use the LMS + Community model.
Let’s start out with how these companies use an LMS.
Custom-built
Deliver Course Content
Thinkific
Resources Archive
Circle
Deliver Course Content + Growth Encyclopedia
Custom-built
Resources + Student Work Display
Circle
Resources Archive
Common observation: We can infer that LMS is used as a content library - a place to host their course materials, resources and a place for students to share their work.
Let’s now take a look at how they integrate a community within their courses and the infrastructure they use.
Discord + Scenes
Simulate a classroom-like experience. Peer engagement.
Slack
Enables PMs, founders and engineers to connect. Heart of the business.
Slack
Community is the core product of the business.
Custom 3D Metaverse Platform: Metaversity
Simulate a classroom-like experience in an online learning world.
Discord
Simulate a classroom-like experience in an online learning world.
Common observation: Community is seen to be at the centre of everything they do. It’s either the core product or it is the retention layer that makes students stick to the course.
The questions asked above were fairly simple. What purpose does your LMS and Community solve for your business?
From the answer given by the representatives at each of the start-ups, we can draw the following statement.
Observational Statement - Community is critical to the core-experience whereas LMS is a nice-to-have functional component.
Here’s what the representatives at these companies had to say about the role of LMS and community in their course-models.
“Community is at the heart of what we do. LMS helps us build an archive of resources with lifetime accessibility to our participants.”
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"Community is no more something that you do outside the product. It IS the product. The two basic tenets of Invact are craft and community. Ask yourself, have you ever learned something without a community supporting you?"
“Community is the product. LMS solves for having all the content in one place.”
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“People come for content and stay for the community. NPS has a direct correlation with the community experience they have in the cohorts.”
The college-like model is actually working for these start-ups and using online tools, they’re able to simulate a virtual campus so to say. A trend I’ve been noticing is how the founders use college-related terms to represent parts of their product.
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“The community-led courses not only have classrooms but also simulate hostels. Discord for us is the hostel.”
These tweets and news articles from the founders of some of these companies goes on to further validate the hypothesis.
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Looking at such compelling statements and evidences of how being community-first has enabled these companies to :
I can confidently validate the hypothesis I started out with.
I’ve made a matrix to help visualize this better :
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Going all in on community-led growth may seem like a risky strategy to place your bets on. The main reason behind this is because building a community takes time - anywhere between 8-12 months. But what you’re not seeing are the compounding benefits that come.
Stellar Course Completion Rates: A social-layer in your courses makes your students more accountable with the help of grouping and pairing systems. In addition to this, time-boxing each cohort makes most of the students complete the course.
Strong Word-of-Mouth: A community experience during an online course always feels more fun and intimate for the student taking it. When closing up, it feels like the end of a long journey that a group took together. Students talk about these experiences to others and generate a stronger word-of-mouth than self-paced courses.
Alumni Networks : Students who have completed a cohort are always happy to continue being active members of the course community. Through them, new students get opportunities for placements and jobs.
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A Place to Belong : Beyond all other reasons, one of the biggest reasons why course communities live way beyond their course end-dates are because they bring a group of like-minded people together. It becomes a space where these students can connect and bond with one another.
It’s only a matter of time before EdTech businesses adapt and make themselves future-proof by switching to the community-led model. When you have a strong community, whether the market is in a bull-run or a recession, your business is here to stay.
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