Scaling General Assembly's Classroom Experience Online
Designing a platform that blended live sessions, community, and interactive content to match the success of GA’s in-person courses.
Student dashboard for GA’s first online course platform
Problem
General Assembly needed to develop an online course platform that could achieve the high completion rates of its in-person classes—an essential factor in delivering value to students. Many online courses, including MOOCs, often face low completion rates, making student engagement a critical challenge.
Research
To understand the needs of students and teachers, we conducted interviews with current students in GA’s in-person courses, GA instructors and prospective online students.
Key insights included:
1. Students relied on GA for motivation and accountability.
2. Video-only courses had extremely low completion rates (less than 10%).
3. Teachers required data to identify struggling students and understand their challenges.
Exploration
We explored a variety of content types to determine what would drive engagement and be scalable for online learning. These included videos, quizzes, interactive activities, and live sessions. Additionally, we evaluated the potential for integrating tools that would provide real-time insights into student performance and engagement.
Solution
The result was Circuits, a cohort-based online course platform that combined multiple learning formats, including asynchronous videos, interactive quizzes, live sessions, and collaborative activities. We also built admin tools that allowed educators to create, update, and refine course content, while providing data on student progress and performance. A key feature enabled students to share their progress with peers, fostering accountability and motivation—essential for driving completion rates.
Outcome
The Circuits platform significantly expanded General Assembly’s online education offering, achieving:
1. A completion rate of over 75%, comparable to in-person courses.
2. More than 2,000 students completing courses in the first two years.
The platform successfully blended live sessions with asynchronous learning, creating a highly engaging experience. Its community-driven features kept students motivated and ensured consistent outcomes. The project demonstrated that General Assembly could replicate its classroom success in a digital format, establishing a new standard for online education.
Work samples
Documentation from a user journey workshop conducted with stakeholders.
Key Product Attributes used to the design of key touchpoints
The course dashboard is designed to give a clear view of the course content and important details.
A key feature was tracking progress to encourage them to keep pace with peers, helping maintain motivation.
Quiz scores were accessible to admins and curriculum designers to identify students needing support and areas of our curriculum needing improvement.
We build a flexible interface for delivering code challenges in a range of subjects, and a CMS for educators to build them.
“Mentors” were internal staff who led in-person sessions, gave students feedback on their work, and generally helped students when they were stuck.
Profile pages showcased student work, and were publicly available, helping promote the course.
Student Project Pages encouraged visibility and discussion among students.
The admin was designed for teachers to easily create and edit course content and view student test scores.