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Praful Gupta - Postscript
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Should NextLeap build an LMS?

What is our vision?

Enable the talent in the workspace to realise their true-potential

How will we achieve it?

Empower the best teachers to create world-class CBC’s that help people up-skill and get better at what they do
Create CBC’s on topics that our team can teach
Learn and understand what creates a great learning experience
Get the best people in the world to teach CBC’s and use our learnings to make these CBC’s great

Where are we at right now?

Started with DMPM sprint and then the APM fellowship
Validated our initial hypothesis on what makes a great learning experience
Used Notion, Zoom and Slack to conduct these CBCs

Where do we want to be at by 2022 end?

Best teachers are able to create CBCs for NextLeap
Play-books and Infra to creating a good CBC
Build an engaging community of self-leaners

Deciding if we should build an LMS

Framing

Will we be able to scale NextLeap without an LMS?
Will an LMS improve our learners learning experience?

Stakeholders

We can segment our stakeholders in primarily three segments
Learners
Teachers and collaborators
NextLeap team

Problems with the current setup

Stakeholders
Problems today and tomorrow
1
Learners
Time-consuming for the learners to access the course
Information is distributed across different places
Calendar: Schedule and call invites
Notion: Session recording and course resources
Slack: Communication and engagement with fellow learners and mentors

Time-consuming for the learners to create notes
One of the most important part of these courses is that the learners can come back and refresh on any topic to use them in their daily lives. The material available however for even a small 2 week course like DMPM can be overwhelming when someone is trying to look for that one concept.
To solve this problem, a learner would make notes. But since the course material ranges from Videos, Reading material, Slides and so on, it can be daunting at times to make notes by clipping videos, taking screenshots and so on
In doc slide decks are pathetic in Notion
2
Teachers and collaboraters
Time consuming and difficult for the teachers to setup the automations required for their course
Emails to all the signed up leaners
Guest additions in the Notion pages
Guest additions in the Slack rooms

This will discourage teachers to create courses for NextLeap
3
NextLeap team
Impossible to track and measure learner’s progress with limited functionalities of the current stack (Notion, Zoom, Slack)
Time consuming to setup and monitor automations for each course
For courses that might have a large number of learners like the APM Fellowship, it might add more complications to setup and monitor these automations
Loss of upsell opportunities when a learner is revising their completed course and we have new courses which they might be interested in
Setting up type-forms for every course
Typeform business plan only allows 5 users.
When we will have new courses being taught by other teachers, we would need to be there to create forms or them
The alternative would be to ask the teachers to create their own typeform account
This would result in us losing the data for these forms (since we won’t have the access) or it will be way too complicated/time consuming to get the teachers share their forms feedback
There are no rows in this table
⁠

Impact of solving this problem

Improve our learners’ learning experience
Help us scale and launch new courses
Help us track learner’s progress and gamify it to increase overall success of the learning

Why should we be solving this problem now?

We need to know what makes a great LMS before we scale our platform to more teachers
Just like our teaching methodology, we also need to understand what would make a great LMS
If we solve this problem now, we will be able to use this LMS for our next couple of courses. We will use the feedback and learnings from them to improve our LMS so that it can be used by any teacher on our platform

Possible negative consequences of building our own LMS

Inadequate capabilities
When we build our own LMS, we can’t build all the capabilities at-once. For example, we might not build video-conferencing or capability to build in-app forms in our first version.
These restrictions can result in teachers using other products that could lead to learners hopping on and off between different products which was one of the problem we intend to solve
Less engagement as compared to Slack
Building a communication/engagement platform like Slack is no small feat. They have invested years and millions to be at where they are.
We might not be able to build as engaging communicating platform as we would like and this would impact the “Social” part of our learning experience
We might have to depend on Slack for a foreseeable future to power engagement between our learners
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