Learner Outcome: Feedback and support with sentiment meter

Opportunity Objective You are not alone. Learning online with minimal face-to-face support can be daunting. We can encourage learners who ironically feel alone in large online courses by providing them information on how others are doing and have done with various elements of the course. For example, "This is hard for everyone. Really, it's ok."

This can be an opt-in feature since learners vary in their appreciation of and how they are impacted by this information. Initial experimentation of this feature with iterative improvements based on actual usage/impact would be needed.

Market Evidence A recent learner study by the edX UX team shows how learners seek more feedback on how they are doing. They sometimes go into the discussion forums to see how other learners are doing.

Behavioral studies on 'social norm' indicate how users are encouraged and motivated by others around them. However, while this may significantly help certain (extroverted) users, this may backfire for others. So we can consider an opt-in or more intelligent enablement of this feature.

Proposal Specifics We can build upon the feedback modules idea proposed in OEROADMAP-65 but target this type of learner feedback.

To take an iterative approach, we can start by displaying imprecise-but-close estimates based on already collected data in our pipelines. For example, find problems where learners submitted many (2 or more) attempts before getting the right answer. Display an encouraging message (with some stats) when a future learner gets the problem incorrect the 1st time.

Have the learner acknowledge the message with an emoji that indicates how the message helped or didn't help them. In the future, we can use these responses as an indicator of how much this learner appreciates or doesn't appreciate these types of messages.

Success Measures Immediate Leading indicators

% of learners who respond with positive acknowledgment of their feedback messages
Lagging indicators of success
increase in learner retention and engagement

[Source: https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/OEROADMAP-66]

openedx / platform-roadmap

Learner Outcome: Feedback and support with sentiment meter #86