A Exploration of Online Courses Platform
—— A successful commercialization of my entrepreneurship
Mar. 2020 - Dec. 2021
With Chicago locked down in the pandemic period, our developing “Go Museum” program also has been paused inevitably. After a thorough discussion with my business partner - Lily, we decided to develop our own online courses rather than waiting hopelessly. This transition is right, we made a successful commercialization of our small business.
Transitioning to teaching online courses is not easy. Lily and I didn’t have enough online teaching experience at that time and the existing customers we explored in local museum programs are mainly focusing on in-person extracurricular activities.
Considering these situations, we started a series of free online classes for 3 months to get familiar with online teaching pedagogy as well as explore our e-learning customers. The result is significant, we expanded our original local parents' base into a large online customer community with thousands of people from the west coast to the east coast.
As Chicago Public School rolled to online teaching as well, more and more concerns from young students’ parents emerged. These concerns mainly focus on online teaching quality. Some parents complained to us “that teacher only taught 1 hour in a day!”. Therefore, these parents need some “hardcore” online courses to fill their children’s tremendous time.
What are “hardcore” courses?
After inquiring with some parents, “hardcore” courses that can be performed online are:
What are “hardcore” courses?
Hence, we invited seven accomplished instructors to design and implement our online curriculums:
Nicole
A housewife with two children, proficient in paper crafting and clay figure
Yujie
A mandarin Chinese teacher who worked in ECC Japan for five years
Qian
Graduated from IIT in Mathematical Finance, worked in many industries including hospitality and tech startup
Yuefeng
A graduate student from SAIC in Art History, Theory and Critics area, worked as curator assistant intern at The National Museum of China
Lisa
A professional tour guide in Europe has over 20-year industry working experience
Hurrot
Graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in Illustration major
Jerry
Graduated from top-tier art school in Canada - OCAD University, established own studio dedicating to art training for senior high students who want pursuing in art college
Due to the privacy issue, I use mimic avatars instead of real faces
Art Classes
The Foundation of Illustration
Hurrot
2 Classes for age 5 - 7 / age 7 - 10
Learning basic drawing techniques
Western Art History for Children
Lily
2 Classes for age 4 - 6 / age 7 - 10
Learning ancient Greek and Rome history in hilarious way
Creative Thinking of Art
Jerry
For age 7 - 10, up to 10 students
Inspiring young children’s creativity of design and image thinking ability
Paper Handcraft Workshop
Nicole
For age 7 - 10, up to 15 students
Making gorgeous easy-peasy paper flowers with Nicole
Animal Clay Modeling
Nicole
2 Classes for age 4 - 6 / age 7 - 10
Learning how to use air hardening modeling clay to craft miniature animals and dishes
STEM Classes
Programming 101 - Swift Playground
Quanpeng
For age 7 - 10, up to 6 students
Introducing basic coding skills with gamified educational tool
Python 101
Quanpeng
For age 9 - 12, up to 6 students
Systematically learning Python step by step in entertaining ways
Science Experiment
Quanpeng
For age 7 - 10, up to 10 students
Doing easy hands-on science experiments following with teacher at home
Language
The Romance of Chinese Poetry
Lily
For age 7 - 10, up to 15 students
Learning Chinese poetry by drawing and reading
Chinese Literacy
Yujie
2 Classes for age 4 - 6 / age 7 - 10, up to 6
Learning Chinese characters, discovering the secret of pictographic
For Adults
Appreciation of Rome Masterpieces
Lisa
Learning ancient Rome history through European architectures, sculptures, and oil paintings, etc.
Virtual Museum Tour at Art Institute
Yuefeng
Free Classes
Weekly Open Online Class
All instructors
Every Friday night, we have one or two free online classes open to the public, conventionally. All instructors we recruited are obliged to participate in these open classes once a month. We think this open classed could be used for promoting instructors’ pedagogies and establishing a good relationship with students.
After our online course structure was established, to better support teachers and operate this small business, the duties of Lily and I have been clarified.
Some duties we may share such as 1) recruiting and training instructors; 2) assisting weekly open classes as a co-host; 3) arranging routine meetings every week; 4) setting business goals and developing strategies.
Lily
Maintain customer relationships
Advertising and publicity
Coordinate instructors’ relations
Organize periodic team building
Quapeng
Maintain bank and digital service accounts
Invoicing and send payment to instructors
Design all business publicity materials including posters, course brochures, etc.
In a calendar year, we have five open enrollment periods and academic terms, each class registration period lasts roughly 3 weeks, and each term lasts 10 weeks.
How we did in one academic term?
In June 2020, we attempted the first commercialization of our online courses, and the result is satisfactory. However, compared to our large customer community, we still have more space to increase the signup conversion rate. Here is the demonstration of preparing our first commercialized academic term.
Why signup conversion rate is low?
Compared with other companies in the e-learning industry, we have to admit that our platform is so tiny and new. From parents’ perspectives, they prefer a well-known brand with high credibility, as the quality of teachers can be guaranteed.
#1 Iteration
For that reason, we iterated the enrollment process first time:
Parents can request a full refund after the first lesson if students are not satisfied.
If students cannot catch up with the teaching pace after the second lesson, we can offer a partial refund of untaken lessons as tuition credit, and this credit can be used for next class enrollment.
Results:
We are fully aware this change gave all instructors huge pressure, though we believe it can help us build a good reputation and attract more customers to enroll in classes. The revenue of the following enrollment has grown 130% compared with the last season.
#2 Iteration
Facing the competition of Chicago's local Chinese schools, in early 2021, we iterated the enrollment process a second time.
Results:
“5$ Trial Classes” draws huge attention from our potential customers, it leads the revenue of the next following enrollment has grown 71% compared with the last period. The overall customer retention rate remains at 70% roughly, in some popular courses such as Chinese Poetry and Handcraft Workshop, that rate is near 90%.
In the mid-2021, the revenue of online courses declined for the first time, here are some reasons we found:
As companies and schools resume operations, students go to schools, parents go to work, and students do not have enough time for e-learning activities than before.
Without physical limitations, students are rather choosing in-person extracurricular courses for hand-in-hand learning outcomes over online courses. Therefore, our art and languages courses got huge slippage including the popular Handcraft Workshop and Chinese Poetry.
The customer community in WeChat is nearly saturated. Even though we have thousands of parents in multiple group chats, we realized that there are no substantial new customers coming into the group for a long time, and the converting rate is stuck at a lower level.
At the beginning of 2022, we regretted pausing all commercialized online courses, the dedication to the Chinese-American community is still continued and we are still offering online open classes every other week.
The online courses platform is a product under the critical social environment in 2020, yet it is a success. We found the path to commercialize our service in the educational industry, even though this path is competitive. I could have become a UX designer after graduating from college, but I didn’t regret it. In these two years, I learned how to establish and manage a small LLC, I learned how to design and implement the programming and science curriculum, I learned how to cooperate with other co-workers, etc.
