 Hello everyone, good morning. Give me two seconds to connect my laptop. Can I do that? Now? Super. Am I audible? I think this is working, right? Okay. So apologies first of all to those of you who were expecting my slightly better looking colleague, founder and CEO of And Academy, who was originally scheduled to deliver this talk. He apologizes. He is indisposed. I am filling in on his behalf, but we work closely. So hopefully you'll still get what you came here to get. Only one rule for the session. It's a short one anyway. Please ask any questions you have at absolutely any point. Don't worry if I'm in the middle of a thought, a sentence, a slide. It's far more important that you get what you came here to get than that I say what I want to say. Yeah. So what are we going to talk about? The topic has already been divulged, but we're going to talk about designing and engaging an immersive user experience in an online learning environment. Why are we talking about this? Why is it important to talk about this? So obviously we live in the post pandemic reality. COVID has changed education forever and online learning is clearly here to stay. It's much more than that, but at the very least it's here to stay. So it is about time that we figure out how to make it super effective. It's not just something that we have to facilitate. We've got to make it as effective, if not more effective than the traditional offline model, especially because of the access advantages that it has among many others. I'm not reading everything out, but that's an interesting stat that the size of the global online education market would more than double in five years. The World Economic Forum seems to agree with our view on this and has actually found evidence that students retain more material. So contrary to popular perception that you retain more in an offline classroom, some research suggests that students even retain more in an online setup. That makes it even more imperative to ensure that online learning is super effective. Until now, we've probably been mostly trying to do just about enough to not compromise on quality, but it's high time that we take this as an integral part of the future. The other question that almost asks itself is why are we talking about this? That's because the team at Andacademy now has built two design schools, an offline design school, a brick-and-mortar school, which was the norm back in 2015, Indian Institute of Art and Design, or IIAD, and Andacademy, which was launched early last year. In fact, a lot of what I'm going to talk about is going to draw on Andacademy's own case study and journey. So we've explored this problem, we've had to solve for this problem, and we have some learnings to share. So what did we do? What did we do to try and make online learning in design at least as effective as offline, if not better? So we're all designers. I mean, I'm probably one of the exceptions to this statement, but the team is mainly design. I'm relatively new to design. As you heard, my background is more economics finance, but I've moved to a field that I'm very excited about. But we're talking about the team behind Andacademy and IIAD. So we responded to this problem like designers, not as educators first, but as designers first. And we used UX design and design thinking to solve this problem, or to try to solve this problem. I think we're still very much solving this problem. And that is why we're discussing it in UX India. We're not discussing it at an education conference. It is a UX solution to an education design problem. Yeah. So the first step, and let me acknowledge at the outset that some of this, to be very honest with you, is a little bit retrofitted. Because as we know, the best UX design and design thinking processes do not proceed linearly. There is a lot of looping around. So sometimes you research first, and then maybe you define a problem, go out there and do some research and then end up redefining it and get stuck in just that little loop for some time before you move forward to ideating, designing, prototyping, testing and all of that. But we had to, the PPT is a slightly linear format. So we're going to discuss this relatively linearly. It didn't happen as linearly as I'm going to describe it. So the empathy research stage was all about putting the user at the center, obviously, which everybody here in this conference understands and knows about. And understanding what are the challenges that they face in an online environment? And what do they like about the offline environment, which is our current benchmark? So the known challenges of online learning were low retention rates, low retention in terms of material, not retention of students in the classroom, high dropouts of students from courses, low completion rates, isolation, psychological problems that students were facing in online learning. A lot of which, by the way, was pre-recorded is the sort of abiding perception of online learning. The added challenge was the perception around online learning that had been developed from encountering a lot of pre-recorded online learning. Another thing we found, and the post pandemic, we were kind of through the pandemic, we were all waiting to see how post pandemic life was going to be. And so many sectors have just seen a rebound like never before. In person education has seen a rebound like never before, study abroad, etc. Travel and tourism, I'm sure you're all paying through your noses for tickets to any part of the world, including tickets to here, probably for those who are not from Bangalore. So clear signs that people crave social interaction just by default, even if COVID has not led them to believe their lifespan is a little shorter than they probably originally thought. But just inherently, I think it's become clearer than ever that people crave social interaction. And what we found from our own experience very directly was that the learners that inquired with us were asking all the time for shorter courses, but with very deep impact. They don't want short and shallow. They want short and deep, short and career transformative even. So these were the data points we had. And then the obvious bit of research that we had to do was figure out this benchmark that we were trying to beat. What is it about the offline learning format that really works for them? So the teams hadn't broke this down, because the idea was to then try and replicate each piece or challenge ourselves to replicate each piece in the online environment. So the obvious sort of key elements, well, this bit is not so obvious. It took a little bit of doing, but we arrived at seven points that it seemed, I think, fairly relatable and understandable, nothing very technical going on here. The student-teacher interaction, the student-student interaction or collaboration with peers. Sorry, I don't know if I'm getting in the way of your visibility for this side, but please tell me if I am. The ability to discuss and display your work, put it up in a studio and have people gauge it and give feedback. The scope for applying your work practically, be it in projects, as part of portfolio building, whatever it may be, a sense of community, very, very important, co-curricular opportunities, career services. Standard ingredients of the offline model that all of us have been through and know extremely well. And ingredients that, if done well, work for a pretty good sort of wholesome experience. So that took us to, so with that information. And honestly, this actually happened as a defined, empathized research, redefined kind of process, but as I pointed out, I presented it a bit linearly. So what it started, at the start of the pandemic, we were all just struggling to stay afloat. Most industries, education included. At that time, it was about Zoom session, how do we switch it on, how do we record, how do we do stuff like that, right at the start of the pandemic. So the problem statement was just facilitate online learning. Let's make sure that classes happen, right? But very soon, looking back, it was something we're very proud of as a team, that we saw an opportunity in that challenge. And we redefined the problem very soon about not just facilitating it, but to make it at least as effective as offline studio-based learning. So I stated that right at the outside. We have moved a little bit, just in case you're getting the impression that the problem statement, this is the redefined problem statement. And that's when we sort of got into the ideation stage, having done that research, having done that sort of empathetic research from our side. What was clear was some contours of the solution. We froze those pretty early on and of course tested them along the way. We were very sure we wanted to do cohort-based learning. We didn't want learners to learn one-on-one. We didn't want learners to learn pre-recorded. So cohort-based, live with a high degree of human support. While we are an ed tech company, if you want to pigeonhole us, we are actually much more about human support than we are about tech. We embrace tech, adopt tech. I'm saying this in a UX design AI conference. But we adopt all of those tools, AI, and all the tech as it comes as enablers. But without compromising the human support because learning is one of the more difficult tasks that we do. We eat, we sleep, we brush, we do 20 things, we meet people. But learning, I'm sure all of us have found that pretty challenging at various stages of our life. So it's a difficult task and made far more difficult without human support, without human interaction with your mentors, without human interaction with your peers. So we were very clear this was, by the way, again, classic example in our minds of keeping the user in the heart of the solution. Because if I kept the business at the heart of the solution, this is not a great solution. Because the moment you make it cohort based with a high degree of human support, that's a lot of cost going in. Pre-recorded, you record it once, milk it forever. So user-centric solution and then jumping into the sort of micro aspect of the solution, we went about adapting each element of that offline format to the online environment. Sorry, I've lost time because we started a little bit late. We had about eight odd minutes so far. So we'll quickly visit those seven elements and discuss how we mapped it, how we ensured that, and this is actually, some of this may seem a little bit like a lot of people are doing it right now, but I think we're pretty proud of the fact that we were one of the first ones of the blocks. I'm presenting it today, two years later. This was actually prototyped, implemented even before and was born at IIED. So we committed to live classes only, active, interactive and collaborative learning, which I will give you glimpses off, so I won't talk too much about it right now, I'll let the action do the talking. Access to mentors both in and outside of class, not just, you know, come to each disappear, and iterative feedback on work, elements that ensure that interactivity. You give feedback, allow students to, you know, build that into their work, improve it and then give more feedback. Here's a glimpse, audio, anyway, don't worry, it was just music. I'll give you more context on that software that you see over there, but this is all happening in one class and now we've moved to another class. It's a little bit more activity than, I mean, I've taught and been in education for over a decade, it's a little bit more activity I'd say than you see in most offline classrooms even. So with our objective is to ensure nothing gets compromised. We don't give ourselves the excuse, online, that's why it can't happen, sure. Yeah, that was a glimpse. The second bit, collaboration with peers, how do you ensure that the choice of cohort-based learning itself solves a lot of that problem for us. All learning is cohort-based, as I said, peers work on projects together, they give feedback to each other, that is where that pin-up board that you saw is accessible to your peers and your mentors, you're getting feedback, 360 degree feedback. We're not talking about large cohort sizes, you're still learning in a relatively small group, 25 to 30 learners. So those are the elements of cohort-based learning that we built in. This is an example of peer collaboration and review on a type project, not a UX project, a graphic design project, but still relevant. So this is post-its, it's been curated for social media, but the image of the center is actually taken from that online pin-up board and the post-its that you see were actually post-its that people, you know, pasted on that piece of work to share what they thought about it. So that's all feedback, I have one suggestion, you can try cutting the letter O into half to play with it, I don't know if it's readable. So just reading out one or two. How did we do the whole ability to discuss and display one's work and that you have already actually seen, there is an online, there are many online pin-up board software now, but we use Miro and that is our virtual studio. Everything happens there, all course work, students live and breathe on Miro. It is where the messy ideation, every step of the design process can be seen. So you can't, you don't just see that the eventual outcome is you put in an exam, but the whole process. Arguably more of the process than you would see even in an offline studio, because the student would probably do something at home and then come and assemble it, you know, in the studio, but everything is happening on Miro here and it facilitates review and feedback across, without any geographical barriers, from anywhere and in real time. The facility is there of course, doesn't mean you get feedback at 2 a.m. but you get it sooner than you would in the offline world. How do we provide opportunities for a practical application? So one of, this was one of the critical challenges because we had to build in project-based teaching and cracking the project-based piece in the online setup which you already seen a glimpse of was the main challenge. Once we, once we sort of figured that out, then this problem almost solved itself. The fact that we follow project-based teaching with real-world-like briefs, with a lot of feedback, these are all, and there is all of these projects culminate in a portfolio at the end of the course is how we solve for that problem. This is an example of a UX project, so you can hopefully see and agree that the quality of the work, which is sort of the proof of the pudding, hasn't suffered if not, from what we have from industry for a 16, for a 25-week course this is the learning outcome curated entirely in the kind of course that I've described to you. So those were the design processes, the intermediate steps, that's the final output, a website, a dark theme website for a piano school. This is done by the way by somebody with no UX, prior UX experience in a 25-week course. Sense of community, cohort-based learning solves for that. Our choice of platform to operate on MS teams gives us lots of different ways to slice and dice the student body in order to form different virtual communities, the macro community and several micro communities, and again a plus over the offline world, this is a community that can transcend all geographical boundaries. You'll see that in an image, in an upcoming slide, but you know tomorrow we could have students from Guatemala and from Australia and from India studying all at the same time. And there's occasional in-person meet-ups to boot. We don't, we still exist and live in the physical world, so we have no problem with it, so we do meet every once in a while. Co-curricular opportunities, this is the question I got asked in an interaction yesterday with some of the UX India folks, that how do you ensure co-curricular opportunities so vital for your all-down development? We're actually able to do more to be honest. We were able to solve to a greater degree here because it's true industry academia collaboration. Today we can draw on the best talent from around the country, from around the world, and have them you know just log on, it's so much more convenient for the mentors as well to just log in and you know deliver these masterclasses, these workshops, their number, their quality have both gone up. A lot of our learners vouch for that, so again very doable if you're trying to solve this problem for your own institution. This is an example of a comic-making workshop, this is all work done in that workshop. It was a four-part workshop so you can think of it as a I think four into three sort of about a 12-hour workshop across four days and that's a lot of international participants. It was a free workshop, we posted it online, people logged in from all around the world. In the interest of time moving along, this is a workshop on taking animation offline again. If anything, I think we had more than 50 participants on this one as well so in about a week's notice. I don't think we could pull that off in the offline world. Career and placement support, I have a couple of experienced pros from our career services team in the audience right now for moral support. So we invest heavily, again no compromise because it's online. It actually, the same degree of one-on-one attention, we're telling you can be provided in the online space as well. Career related training, networking with companies, again a plus over the offline world, you can offer networking opportunities all over the country, all over the world, wherever the student is going to go and work eventually. In fact, we don't offer a job guarantee or a fee refund on our offline courses at IAID but we can do that here because we're putting our money where our mouth is and we are that confident of the outcome after several iterations. So a call out to all educators out there, take online as a huge opportunity. Some cherries on the cake over and above what offline can offer, I've already pointed out a few but greater access across geographical financial boundaries and also educational backgrounds. So we've not felt the need to ask anybody to only be from design, only 25% of students are actually from a design background. True industry, academia, collaboration as I've said without, you know, those same barriers. And flexible learning is again something you're able to facilitate so much more and students are increasingly asking for that. You want to take a break because circumstances changed, you can do that. You want to sort of, you know, do four months first and then four months and then another four months, you can do that. Class timings are convenient and so on and so forth. These are these are facilities that are brick and mortar school now envies us for being able to provide to our students. This is, I skipped past in the interest of time just a map showing that our learners come from all over learners and mentors. As I said the first prototype was implemented and tested at IAID even before and was born that gave us a lot of confidence to launch and where five batches old and have iterated this five times over already so fairly well tested and thankfully from the evidence so far from the validation so far from industry and from learners it seems to be working. That is something the career services folks can take a bit of credit for 6.1 lakhs per annum as a starting salary is I think adequate industry valid validation or sorry for average salary for entry level graduates almost 100% of learners placed even before they graduated these are signs that industry likes what they're getting from an online only but live program not online prerecorded just these are the people who choose to work with us validation from learners that has sound I don't think I'll be able to set up sound in the middle of the presentation let me let me do well for another time it's going to take at least a couple of minutes but we have students saying lovely things that they like the structure of the course the the the fact that it is planned the way it is and don't miss offline at all and in fact some are learners have told us I don't know that here but I've told us some are learners coming from brick and mortar undergraduate design education have say that this is the best learning experience of their lives forget and academy forget IED and online learning experiences beating an offline learning experience hands down right that is what we have to we have to do with online because of how important the role is going to play in all of our futures in the future of education and then of course we will keep iterating batch five is not our last batch and as long as we you know teach we will keep iterating and hopefully share more learnings with you in UX India 24 any questions thank you for listening thanks a lot can I answer any questions otherwise I mean asked all is actually right there so you can come find me and ask then but asking a third time like an auctioneer any questions okay sold and thank you so much