Scaling General Assembly's Classroom Experience Online
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
Background
General Assembly is a pioneer in tech education, known for its immersive, in-person programs that help adults pivot into careers in design, engineering, data, and business. I joined as the second product designer at the company and led design for our Online Education initiative. The goal: extend GA’s high-impact classroom model into a scalable online format—without sacrificing student outcomes.
Problem
Most online courses suffer from shockingly low completion rates—often under 10%. GA’s in-person programs, by contrast, saw 75–90% completion . To succeed online, we needed to design a platform that could replicate the accountability, structure, and support of a live classroom.
Research
We ran qualitative interviews with:
Current students in GA’s immersive courses
GA instructors and teaching assistants
Prospective online learners
Key insights:
Students needed accountability structures to stay engaged
Video-only learning wasn’t enough—it felt isolating and passive
Instructors needed data to know who was falling behind and why
Exploration
We experimented with formats that balanced scale and interactivity:
Asynchronous video lessons
Quizzes and interactive activities
Weekly live sessions
Progress-sharing among peers
Solution
We launched Circuits, a cohort-based online course platform that blended:
On-demand content with interactive elements
Live touchpoints to create momentum and human connection
Peer accountability through public progress tracking
Instructor dashboards showing student engagement and flags
Outcome
Circuits became a cornerstone of GA’s online strategy, achieving:
75%+ course completion rates, rivaling in-person classes
2,000+ students completing courses in the first 24 months
Strong retention and positive NPS from students and instructors
A repeatable model GA used to scale additional programs
Reflection
This project challenged me to translate a classroom culture into a digital system. I learned how to design for accountability, empower educators through data, and scale human motivation through smart product decisions.
Documentation
Documentation from a user journey workshop conducted with stakeholders.
Output from a workshop I ran with team members across digital product, education, marketing and customer support to define the key product attributes.
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.
A key component of the platform were interactive code challenges. I designed the student interface as well as the CMS used by educators to create the challenges.
“Mentors” were internal staff who led in-person sessions, gave students feedback on their work, and generally helped students when they were stuck.
To help students create better work, we made profile pages that showcase their projects like a portfolio. The pages were public, allowing students to share their work and which promote the product.
Student Project Pages were designed to encourage visibility and discussion among students.
The admin section allowed educators to easily create and edit course content and view student test scores.