Partner Up
Partner up, power through your MOOCs!
PartnerUp, is a mobile application to reduce drop out rates for MOOCs by helping students find study partners/mentors tailored to the MOOC they are undertaking.
Introduction
My Role
Deliverables
Leverage Points
Research
Deriving Insights
Solutions
The Problem
As of 2021, MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses have reached 220 million learners with over 19.4k courses and 1.6k microcredentials.
But less than 13% students are able to complete their MOOCs.
How can we reduce dropout in MOOCs?
Why This problem?
Reducing dropouts not only benefits individual learners but also strengthens the role of MOOCs in shaping the future of education and workforce development.
Maximizing Learning Impact
MOOCs aim to provide accessible education to a global audience. High dropout rates limit the reach of their educational benefits and diminish their effectiveness.
Addressing Global Education Gaps
MOOCs are often designed to address educational inequalities. Helping learner's persist and succeed contributes to closing skill and knowledge gaps worldwide.
Encouraging Positive User Experience
Completion rates are often linked to learner satisfaction. Addressing dropout factors—such as course design, community engagement, and technical support—improves the overall experience.
Enhancing Credibility
High completion rates bolster the reputation of MOOCs, encouraging institutions and learner's to invest in these platforms.
Meet, Partner Up
Partner up, power through your MOOCs!
Find study partners that suit your need.
Provides support, guidance and motivation.
Opportunity to discuss, dissect and learn.
A study partner in context of Partner Up can be a peer at the same week in the same course or a mentor who had at least finished that part of the course.
Engage meaningfully with partners.
Chat, share notes, video calls & more.
With each partner have a study zone where you can have multiple discussion threads active.
Manage all your goals.
Track and manage all your goals.
Share goals with partners and achieve results together.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Learning about MOOCs
What are MOOCs?
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are online educational courses designed to be accessible to a large number of participants worldwide. They are typically offered by universities, colleges, or educational organizations and cover a wide range of topics and disciplines.
Open Access
Large Scale
Flexible Learning
Diverse Content
Certifications
Interactive Elements
How do MOOCs work?
THE approach
To achieve the problem solving, a holistic and comprehensive process was followed.
RESEARCH
Gathering information
INSIGHTS
Gaining an understanding
Derived major insights from the data collected in primary and secondary research by grouping them based on larger themes.
SOLUTION SPACE
Exploring different ideas
Based on the insights gained, I experimented with different ideas that could potentially fulfill the pain points discovered.
MEET THE FINAL DESIGN
So, what did I ended up building?
Based on the pros and cons of ideations, and given the time constraint (just had 2 days of my 7 days left), I chose my final idea.
Looking at Competition
Before beginning the final design, I looked at what else was available on the market that fulfilled similar needs, that is. helped find study buddies or paired people together to study, especially for studying in MOOCs.
Defining The Primary Features
Concepts Utilized
Information Architecture
Crafting the look and feel
The aesthetic for PartnerUp is structural but still playful, encouraging and warm, with small graphic elements that bring the much needed element of joy to an app about education.
Design in action
The below user flow explains how a user adds a new buddy for a course.
