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.
Original wireframes for the student portal.
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. It aims to help students easily see where they stopped and what they should do next.
Each week, students progressed through a new Unit with videos, quizzes, coding challenges, and final projects. A key feature was tracking progress to encourage them to keep pace with peers, helping maintain motivation.
Assessments included multiple choice questions. Quiz scores were accessible to admins and curriculum designers to identify students needing support and areas of our curriculum needing improvement.
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.
To help students create better work, we made profile pages that showcase their projects like a portfolio. We also designed project pages for visitors to see, allowing students to share their work. This helped promote our product and attract new customers.
Student Project Page. These pages were made to encourage visibility and discussion among students. Students felt motivated by seeing comments on their work but appreciated the privacy, which helped them feel comfortable sharing their progress.
Admin portal page. I designed the admin section for teachers to easily create and edit course content and view student data, like test scores.