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.
The Challenge
General Assembly needed to create an online course platform that matched the high completion rates of its in-person classes, a key factor in delivering value to students. Online courses, like MOOCs, often suffer from low completion rates, making engagement a core challenge.
The Solution
I led the design of Circuits, a cohort-based, 5-10 week online course platform that combined interactive content, live sessions, and an internal tool for course management. The goal was to provide a seamless and motivating learning experience that fostered accountability and community among students.
The Outcome
By the time I left General Assembly, over 2,000 students had completed Circuits, with completion rates consistently above 75%, on par with GA’s in-person courses.
My Role
As Lead Product Designer, I was responsible for:
Designing the student experience across digital and non-digital touchpoints.
Creating tools for curriculum designers and course producers to manage and iterate on content.
Contributing to front-end development and mentoring.
Project Background
Circuits was designed to extend General Assembly’s reach to students unable to attend in-person classes due to location or life circumstances. These students valued accountability and community, which we aimed to replicate in an online setting.
Through research, we identified that most prospective students had attempted self-learning but struggled due to lack of structure and support. Our solution needed to blend asynchronous and synchronous learning to accommodate their schedules and provide the necessary guidance to succeed.
Design Approach
To understand the student journey, I facilitated workshops to map out user personas and visualize the entire experience, from onboarding to course completion. We also defined "Experience Attributes" to guide the platform’s design, ensuring that it conveyed human interaction and community by highlighting classmates and mentors within the UI.
Core Design Principles
Simplicity: The platform needed to be easy to use, allowing students to focus on challenging course material without getting lost in the interface.
Engagement: To encourage completion, we integrated progress tracking and cohort visibility, motivating students to keep up with their peers.
Community: Drawing from the success of GA’s in-person classes, we ensured the platform facilitated peer interactions and mentor support, fostering a sense of accountability.
Iterative Development
Given the ambitious timeline, we launched the first courses in under three months, taking an iterative approach. I established the information architecture and designed the core screens, allowing engineering to begin development while I collaborated with product managers to refine the details.
Key features included a course dashboard, weekly unit pages, interactive assessments, and code challenges. We used tools like screen recording to analyze where students struggled and iterated based on real-time data.
Mentorship and Profiles
Mentors played a crucial role in student success, providing personalized feedback and support. To facilitate this, we integrated Calend.ly into the platform, allowing students to easily schedule mentor sessions. We also designed project pages that acted as portfolio showcases, helping students share their work and promote the course.
Admin Tools
For course producers and instructional designers, I helped create a flexible CMS that allowed for content iteration without disrupting active cohorts. This versioning system enabled rapid feedback loops and helped us scale the product quickly.
The concept for the course dashboard was to be an overview of the course content and other key information. We wanted to make it easy for students to figure out where they left off and what to do next.
Each week students would progress through a new Unit. Units included a series of videos, assessments, in-browser code challenges, and final projects. One of the key design decisions was to show the progress of each member of the cohort. The goal was to motivate students to want to keep pace with others. Feedback from students was that this detail was highly effective in motivating them to finish each unit.
Assessments included a series of multiple choice questions. Quiz scores were viewable to admins and curriculum designers who used that information to figure out which students needed support and which parts of our curriculum might need work.
One of the more challenging UI challenges were the interactive code challenges. Starting with our SQL course, we built an entirely new CMS and student facing experience.
“Mentors” were internal staff who led in-person sessions, gave students feedback on their work, and generally helped students when they were stuck.
In order to encourage students to create high quality work we created profile pages that emphasized their projects much like a portfolio site would.
We also created versions of project pages that non-logged in users could see so that students could share them. This also helped us spread the word about the product and gain new customers.
Results
The Circuits platform successfully expanded General Assembly's online education offering, achieving a completion rate of over 75%—on par with in-person courses. More than 2,000 students completed courses during its first two years, helping GA scale beyond its physical campuses. The platform facilitated better engagement through a blend of live sessions and asynchronous learning, while its community features kept students motivated to complete the program. The project proved that General Assembly could replicate its successful classroom experience in a digital format, setting a new benchmark for online education.