Removing obstacles to education can be more important than promoting benefits
Online learning needs to lose its inhibitions
Don’t just create pathways: remove obstacles for your learners
A great resource for product managers is the This is Product Management podcast. A lot of episodes have ideas that can be tailored to ed tech. One example is an episode featuring Matt Wallaert, former Director at Microsoft Ventures and Chief Product Officer at Thrive. When thinking about his products, he thinks about promoting pressures (things that encourage a user to take a desired action) and inhibiting pressures (things that discourage a user from doing the same).
Inhibiting pressures aren’t just competitors, they are anything that keeps someone from using a product. Wallaert uses the example of M&Ms. Why do you eat M&Ms? Well, they are tasty, they are beautiful, they provide energy. All promoting pressures. Why aren’t you eating M&Ms right now? There are many reasons — maybe you are full, or you don’t want sugar, or you don’t like the parent company’s business practices. All inhibiting pressures. The primary inhibiting pressure, however, is probably availability. There’s not a bowl in front of you right now, so you aren’t eating any.
Wallaert makes the case that businesses often focus too much on promoting pressures. I think about this in the case of fitness facilities. Marketing is often tied to feeling good, looking good, etc. The biggest problem for me when it comes to fitness is inhibiting pressures. The class I want isn’t available right now. I forgot my gym clothes. Or, conversely, I worked from home and my gym is near work. I really want to join my friends at happy hour.
Gyms could do so much to reduce these obstacles! What if they partnered with each other and allowed two free visits at a partner gym per month, so you could work out in any geography? What if they had a set of gym clothes available for a modest fee, like $5? What if they had some clever idea for a quick workout (and quick shower) so you can still make happy hour with your friends?
Because the fitness market is so fragmented, I’ve actually taken it upon myself to remove some of these inhibiting pressures. I used to belong to a gym franchise, and would not use any other fitness options, because I reasoned, “I’m already paying for the gym, I don’t want to use anything else, that’s a bad financial decision.” I realized that my goal shouldn’t be to minimize my expenditure, my goal should be to remove obstacles to working out.
So now I have a gym near work and near home (luckily I can now afford this). I have a low-end package on ClassPass so I can take a fitness class pretty much anywhere I find myself in the Bay Area. And when I don’t feel like leaving the house, I can do a quick workout on OpenFit, which offers both live and on-demand classes via my phone. I also keep a set of clean gym clothes at work in case I forget mine.
I literally have zero excuses for not working out at this point. Oh, I still find them sometimes. But much less often.
Learning products can do much to focus on removing inhibiting pressures. Think about what keeps your users from learning right now and address it.
One big one in asynchronous learning is not having a resource available when someone gets stuck. At IDEO U, which offers online courses teaching IDEO’s world-famous approach to design thinking applied to product design, leadership and more, we would often hear about somebody sitting down on Saturday to work on their course — and getting stuck on something. Customer support for IDEO U used to be M-F 9 to 5 job. We were a small outfit, with a limited number of users at a given time, so we weren’t set up to offer real-time support.
We realized this was creating an inhibiting pressure. People were sitting down to do their work and they couldn’t. And by the time they got their answer, the time they had set aside to work on their course was long gone. So we started offering support on the weekends. That’s still asynchronous (support is still not 24/7 and it might take a few hours for a ticket to be responded to). We also set up community features, hoping that learners could help each other.
One step further would be on-demand tutoring or mentoring. Springboard does something nice with this. As a part of taking their courses, learners are paired with a specific mentor they meet with weekly, and they also have on-demand help from a pool of mentors (not necessarily their personal one). So learners can always get unstuck in real time. InstaEDU (now known as Chegg Tutors) offers this as a service out of the box as well.
There are lots of other inhibiting pressures for online learners. First, we need to get them to the learning platform. Inhibiting pressures there might be a lack of an internet connection, or needing to make dinner for the kids, or just being tired. And once they are on the platform, they can run into issues like not having access to a printer (for analog activities), not enjoying reading long pages of text (which online college courses often require), and many, many more.
How might we remove obstacles the same way I did with my fitness activities? Are there partnerships that make you available in more spots? Are there ways for you to keep learner lives at bay so they can focus on work? Can you give users clear guidance on what they should do if they have five minutes to spend with you, but not 60? As a pie-in-the-sky idea, what if online universities offered a “learning gym” facility where you could go and work, and they offered free daycare while you worked on your degree?
Instead of focusing on emails inviting users back to class or reminding them of deadlines, or of the new job they hope your education will lead to, think about what obstacles in their lives (unrelated to learning) might be keeping them from using your product, and address those. By removing inhibiting pressures, you can help your learners make you a part of their routine, and keep life from getting in the way.
