Build an education product for Facebook.

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Build an education product for Facebook.

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Arnab Bhattacharya · Answer 1 · 2022-05-01T02:50:40+0000

Clarify

Is this product meant to be a standalone application OR something build on the FB app? : FB App
What would be the goal of the product ?: You can decide
Any specific geographical region targeted? : We can start with the US.
Time frame: 3-6 months

The way I would want to approach this question is in 3 parts:

Why -- Why would FB want to build an education product
Who -- Who is the user for the product?
What -- What are the specific features we would want to build?

Answering Why

Education is a fast growing market. There are various flavors of growth one being the MOOCs like Coursera, the other being the more personalized learning apps like Byju's in India. However, this flavor of education is transactional in nature where there is a defined give-and-take between the parties and the connection between them last only during the transaction which is not what aligns with FB's mission. FB mission is allow people to create communities and get closer. From that perspective, I think here we are talking about product which helps users get education from the community and in turn gets the users closer and connected. So, I would restate the problem statement as

Build an education product which helps users learn from the community and in turns gets them closer and connected.

Answering Who

The 3 primary segments who are seeking education in a communal way are s follows:

School students (Aged: 13-18)
College Students (Aged: 19-25)
Professionals (Aged: 25-60, looking to uplevel their skills)

Prioritization Score:

Market Size
Pain with existing solutions
FB Mission for getting connected

School Scoring : Market (M): Pain(S): FB Mission(H)

Though by volume students would be high, many student's decision is controlled and impacted by parents who might not be very conducive to the idea of studying in FB. Hence rated M

There are many alternate solutions available like special tutions and classes. Hence rated S

FB Mission: They are at the age where they would be looking for making connections and friends and hence good for FB Mission. hence rated H

Similarly scored the other as follows:

College: Market (H) Pain (M) FB Mission (H)

Professionals : Market (M): Pain (S): FB Mission (S)

So chosen segment: College Students

Answering What

Pain points:

Guidance
- What subjects to take?
- How to plan career?
Study Help
- Not able to understand something
- Not able to solve specific problems
- Need practice partners
Needs Motivation / Proof of progress

I will prioritize Guidance and Study Help as they are applicable to almost all students and will have the most impact.

Features:

Mentorship

Some achiever students willing to give back to the student community will mark them as mentors. Junior students will ask them questions about which subjects to take or regarding planning their career. Mentors will answer their questions and if suited will get into a more long term association with the students. The Mentors will be able to set goals for the students and help them make progress.

Study Room

Students would be able to create joint study room for specific subjects. Other students will search for relevant rooms and join. Once the students find their partners might keep it open for new joinee requests or close the room for other partners. Rooms could be scheduled recurrently for a sustained joint learning experience. This feature

Solution Live Session

Students will post problems in the groups and other students will upvote them. A student who has already worked out the problem will schedule and Live Event to show how he has solved the problem. The students who upvoted the problem will be notified of the live session.

I would prioritize the solutions based on

1. Breadth of problem (% of users who have the problem),

2. Depth of impact (How much impact the solution makes),

3. Implementation Ease

By that I would prioritize Solution Live Session as it will be applicable for almost all users, will benefit the students immensely and as it can built on top of the existing Live product would not be very costly to build and we should be able to launch in the target 3-6 months

Success Metrics:

The User goal is to get value from the Live Sessions. So, the key metrics would be

number of users joining in live session (Joining could be defined as attending > x% of the session) ==> To show users are getting value
Number of live sessions hosted ==> To show overall live session engagement is increasing
Number of users hosting live sessions ==> To show a broad base of users are hosting live sessions

FB is looking for engagement and connection. So the key metrics over here would be

No. of users accessing the product
Avg. time spent on the education product
No. of new connections generated after accessing the product

Risks:

One risk of the Live Session product is the host might not be able to do a good job of explaining, helping the users. Then the time spent by the joiners are mostly wasted. The host might not join after scheduling the live event. These could cause dis-engagement with the product. One way to counter that is to allow joiners to provide ratings to the host. A erring host would have bad rating and hence would have less joiners in the future. Some users with very poor rating might also be barred from hosting events.

kuma0177 · Answer 2 · 2020-03-29T07:28:29+0000

Assumptions:

Part of the core FB product and not standalone app/
Education for children in 13-18 range

Goal: To improve the education of children while building stronger social networks with their family/friends and thus further the mission of the company of bringing the world together and offering tools to form communities.

Key user segments:

Students (middle and high school)
Teachers
Parents

For the purpose of this exercise, I would like to focus on the student user group, since I believe they are relatively larger in size and any change on them will have a bugger impact on the goal and FB’s mission.

The specific student persona I want to focus on initially are:

On the east and west coasts
Have access to high-speed internet, tech-savvy
Age range 13-18
Often are managing school life, extracurriculars, and work sometimes
Have a hard time staying on top of things and getting help from peers

Key problems faced:

Collaborating with friends on exams, homework etc to learn things
Avoiding social interaction in schools due to fear or bullying etc
Some students suffer with ADD, Dyslexia and are not able to get the right aids for learning due to lack of personal attention.
Personal mental health issues faced by students due to family issues etc that affects their learning

Overall the main problem boils down to not being able to get the personal help they need to learn things in a way that makes sense to them in a supportive environment.

Some solutions to solve this:

Personalized FB classroom groups
1. A private FB group by the school for each grade with all students and teachers. Within each group, you can have office hours to ask questions to teachers, students, TAs via video chat. Collaborate with students anytime via messenger/WhatsApp.
VR based interactive learning rooms/groups
1. Allow for a VR based interactive medium to interact and learn with other students and ask questions from teachers.
AR-based support in FB groups to help with homework and assignments.
1. Allow students to annotate homework assignments drawings etc while collaborating and

In order to prioritize these solutions, I will measure them along the following dimensions: 1. Impact on UX (reach of users, impact on FB mission, impact on user delight), 2. Engineering Effort

Since we already have 1 and 2 by FB via groups and occulus, they will require minimal engineering efforts to redesign them to suit our specific needs. AR-based document annotation isn’t there on FB will require a lot of effort so it the highest in engineering effort.

In terms of the impact on UX, I believe #1 (personalized FB groups) will have the highest impact due to the reach on # of users, VR will have lesser impact since very few people will have access to occulus.

Thus, I would pick #1 as the feature to prioritize.

The expected user journey for it will be as following.

FB in conjunction with schools and teachers will setup private groups for students and teachers.
Teachers and TAs will be allowed to setup office hours with their areas of expertise
Students will be able to ask each other questions and collaborate via group-based chats, reply with photos etc of the work they are doing. Get feedback from the teachers without being constrained by regular school hours.
Students will be able to record videos of how they are thinking and hold live sessions with other students to do group study.

Success Metrics:

DAU and WAU metrics for students and teachers who are part of these groups
# of office hours held and questions asked/answered

Risks and Tradeoffs:

Users (students) get cannibalized into this feature and their engagement with other features drop
Students get distracted due to this feature and may end up spending more time on FB socializing and not actually studying

PM Team · Answer 3 · 2020-02-09T08:22:30+0000

Assumptions

Education product means a learning product
Existing FB users - mostly above 20 years
There can be 2 goals for fb - Acquire new users let's say younger users; engage existing users

Users & User goals

Consumers

School Students --> Help with their studies, get good grades, Ace competitive exams
College Students --> Help with studies, employability skills, Interviews
Young Professionals --> Learn new skills, Workplace behaviour / Collaboration
Mid level Professionals --> Upgrade skills, managerial skills
Older Professionals --> Advanced managerial skills
Self employed users --> business management skills, sales & marketing skills
Remote workers in the internet economy --> How tos? Instructive lessons, Skills

Creators

School Teachers
Professionals
College Professors
Entrepreneurs & Small Business owners
Individuals
Institutions

The Product Options

Separate Learn & grow section on fb app
1. Videos
2. Learning Games
3. Assessment Sessions
Recommend Learning videos basis user profile and activity
FB Kids App with focus on games and learning

I choose to go live with educational and learning content for the 17 to 25 years (College students & young professionals). These are the most numerous and have the highest engagement and they are best testing ground for further extensions.

GTM

Launch an invite only Creators App where users can
- View popular topics
- Add or request a new topic
- Create educational content on a digital storyboard software
- Add voice to content
- Submit
Game developers can develop learning games
Ways to screen content before pushing live
Live content is suggested to user in their feed in the first version
Monetization Models
- Ads based - in roll and banner;; also greater engagement should increase user revenue
- Pay per lesson
- Subscription

On the supposition that greater engagement shall increase ads revenue, I will go with this model at launch

Magda · Answer 4 · 2020-04-06T16:35:38+0000

Assumptions: It’s safe to assume that this education product would live within the core FB offering, correct? yes

First of all, the mission of FB is to create connections between people and creating tools for people to create strong communities. Education is key to activating curiosity and critical thinking skills which contributes to openness of people to create stronger bonds, so a product like this definitely falls under the mission of FB.

I'd like to propose that goal of this feature should be to help users achieve learning goals.

Users: let's first outline the users involved in learnings and segment them

Teacher
- Specialization of subject (math, science, etc)
- Professional or a parent
Learner
- Age: K-12, college, adult learner
- Location

I’d like to focus on the learner user persona because then even if there’s no teacher or parent involved in the kids' education, the learner can still learn on their own. I’d like to focus on the K-12 learner because those are the years when some of the basic most important education is introduced.

User needs and problems:

Students may need more help beyond the classroom time to learn
It’s boring to learn things and it’s difficult to stay engaged
It's hard to focus: some kids may be battling emotional issues, problems at home which makes it hard to focus on learning
It's hard to find time: some kids may have jobs and other extracurricular things so they may have trouble finding time to learn

I’d like to focus on the problem where students may need more help beyond classroom time to learn, and also they may need different formats to learn that are more engaging than a classroom. I want to focus on this problem because in my estimation it affects the most students and it's also where FB can contribute the most (it'll be hard to help with emotional issues or time).

Solutions:

FB might help this problem by:

Creating a page with “On demand events” for teachers from around the world for particular topics. These events could be then streamed asyncronously by students to learn on their own time.
VR lessons/classrooms to get extra help, to meet professionals/ masters of skill they are trying to learn or tocollaborate
“Meet a professional page” where you could browse professionals who are willing to teach a particular skills via FB messenger session
Personalized FB classroom group for your classroom where you can interact with your classmates and teacher after the class

Given that students seem to need more time beyond classroom, I believe creating a FB classroom group where teachers and classmates can answer questions would be the best solution. I also think this would be easy to implement as groups already exist, so we'd be using an existing tool.

Success metrics:

# of groups created
# of active admins
Activity of the groups (could
Segmentation of activity of members in the groups
Satisfaction with learning via this channel
Performance: load time, downtime

In this list, I'd prioritize the activity of members in the groups. We could create a funnel - High activity members>med>low activity and try to improve activity of members by building features to probe them to engage.

Risks:

Not every parent allows their kids to use FB, even for educational purposes
Not every child has a device at home
Some students don't learn by being active collaborators (they are more self-learners) and trying to engage them in the group could prove distracting to learning

paribest_007 · Answer 5 · 2020-03-29T21:08:47+0000

Clarify

What is the goal of the product? Let us assume the goal is to provide virtual classrooms
Is the education product for college students? No
Is the education product for any users with special needs? Let us assume that the product is for children attending middle/high school (grade: 6-12)
Should we incorporate the experience in the Facebook core app? It is upto youWe are planning to design an education product to provide classroom experience for students in grade 6-12.

We are planning to design an education product to provide classroom experience for students in grade 6-12.

I would like to build the experience in the core Facebook application because we could potentially re-use lot of functionality provided like video, messaging, groups etc.

Users

Students who go middle & high school. The users are mostly technically savvy so they should be comfortable in using applications irrespective of the devices.
Teachers - It is important that our products provide experience so that the teacher can focus on teaching. We can use the Facebook echo system for teachers to communicate.
Parents - Typically use for communicating with teachers, checking status of assignments, checking grades on quizzes, tests & missing assignments.

We will be focusing on the user group 1 & 2. Solution for user group 3 can be built later after the success of the initial product

List of user needs for the user group

Typically, in classroom - The teachers teach various subjects to students, give additional study material if needed, students do quizzes/assignments/tests, teacher must grade the quizzes/assignments/tests, students ask questions to the teachers.

1.   Teacher will reach various subjects thru video conferencing to students
2.   Teacher should be able to share additional study material/quizzes/assignments/tests etc. to students
3.   Students should be able to take quizzes/assignments/tests and submit to the teacher.
4.   Teacher should be able to manage graded for quizzes/assignments/tests
5.   Students should be able to ask questions to the teachers or other students
6.   Teachers/students should be able to manage the calendars

Prioritize the user needs

We will priortize 1, 2, 5.

1 will be core feature of the product. It will allow the teacher and students to communicate with each other.
2 Teachers will need some way to engage the students. This will include the ability to share the material that might be needed for the class.
5 is interesting one, but we can leverage the existing messaging capability to ask questions between students & teachers. This will be feature that will delight the students & teachers.

List the solutions

1.    Build invitation only Facebook group that will allow the students/teachers.
2.    Integrate the video chatting capability in the Facebook
3.    Allow teachers/students to whiteboard on screens.
4.    Integrate with Oculus for VR capabilities
5.    Share study material (files with various formats) in the group
6.    Allow students to post questions to the teachers or entire group

Evaluate your solutions

We should prioritize building 1,2,5,6 in the initial MVP release. These would require us to integrating with capabilities that are already supported in Facebook.

3,4 would be features that are not practical at this time but can be re-prioritized based on the success of the initial product.

Summarize your answers

We should be able to develop great product by using all the capabilities provided Facebook echosystem. We should develop the product in such a way that the teacher can focus on what she does best - teaching.