When you work as a product manager, you start seeing product analysis opportunities everywhere. In our current economic system, everyone is buying and selling, even if it doesn’t seem that way, and you see similar patterns repeated. Successful products and services share patterns, as do mediocre ones with failures. Often the difference between success and failure are due to factors outside your control, such as market timing and a bit of luck. However, all successful products and services are really good at managing the things they can control. They know who they are, what they do, and what makes them unique and how they appeal to people who are interested in them. They focus on what makes them different from their competitors, and enhance that, rather than trying to copy others. They know what their customers look for, and what they find appealing, and they make sure they address those wants and needs. In other words, they really understand their product differentiator.

Today, I want to write about e-learning for K-12, or for both primary and secondary education. What can we learn when we analyze online learning for our kids from a product management perspective? Education may not seem like a product, but it is a service, and looking at it from this perspective is helpful. When you focus on e-learning as a product, interesting and important insights start to emerge. user needs that seem to be at odds with each other start to form patterns, and focusing on a product differentiator can help e-learning ventures be successful.

Here in North America, “K-12” tends to refer to publicly funded schools. There are also charter schools (a combination of private and public), private schools, alternative schools, and school from the home, such as homeschooling and unschooling. While it might not seem like a publicly funded service is a product, that a product manager might be interested in, education works within the same system everything else does. Within the political climate of the past few decades, public funding for education has changed, and isn’t as concentrated on traditional public schools anymore. This fragmentation of education funding highlights differences and creates more competition. Parents are looking at specialized schools and programming for their kids, and more people are looking at alternatives. Another wrinkle is that the customers are split across decision makers, who are adults, and students, who are children. The adults make the choices for the products and services, but the primary users are the children. Since adults make the decisions, their frame of reference is based on their own education experience from the past, the values they teach and reinforce at home, and in many cases, choices that revolve around conspicuous consumption and status. Thanks to technology, globalization, fragmenting social structures and a more individualistic view of society, there are a lot of competitors to traditional publicly funded in-person school. There are a lot of choices for education approaches for adults to pick for their children. Education solutions also face competition from activities that students themselves engage in. From social media to video games to television and movies, there are many technology and online tools that hold the attention of our children and are in direct competition with education pursuits. From different school funding models, different school focuses and approaches, alternative schools, home schooling, to the tools our children utilize and activities we engage in, makes the competition landscape for publicly funded schools complex. Their competition is coming from all directions, which puts pressure on policy makers, lawmakers, and especially parents and the children doing the actual work within the service provided to them.

More and more, school systems and discussions about how our children learn are topics of concern, controversy, and for parents in particular, sources of stress and anxiety. Thanks to charged political rhetoric and social media driven controversial headlines and stories, education issues are often over simplified and lack crucial nuance. Solutions are often pitched as overly simple, and as a binary choice of either one or the other approach, often with value judgments assigned to either side of the debate. “Our preferred approach is inherently good, and that other approach we are uncomfortable with is inherently bad.” For example, some education proponents feel that students should only learn math using rote memorization vs. those that advocate for experiential learning in math. Some education proponents feel that teaching reading should be done with a whole language approach, while others advocate for structured literacy. Some advocate for lots of testing, others utilize ongoing observation and coaching. Some teachers are more authoritarian, while others utilize completely child-led approaches to teaching. Some feel that computing technology is an asset for learning, others ban any electronic devices. Similarly, some proponents advocate for virtual or e-learning approaches, while others demand students only learn in-person.

I’m just scratching the surface here. Education is full of complicated issues, and requires careful thought and exploring not just the fragmentation of approaches from the general to the specific, but to move from simple polarities to detailed nuance. This isn’t easy, but we will explore what makes e-learning effective, what it can address, and why people want to utilize it.

e-learning Has a Perception Problem

Publicly funded e-learning is an interesting phenomenon to study because it doesn’t get the attention or resources that publicly funded in-person schools do. When it is mentioned publicly, it is often mentioned in passing, or within a narrow context. Furthermore, defining e-learning is quite broad, it just means you utilize technology in an educational setting. It can be as simple as using a learning game developed by a company, to an all encompassing virtual school that is publicly or privately funded. There is more to online learning than local school districts implementing e-learning temporarily due to exigent circumstances. This leads to one of the most interesting aspects of e-learning at the time of writing is it has a poor perception in the public sphere. Parents, politicians, periodical writers and news organizations often attach a negative value judgment to e-learning. That is because the majority of people who experienced e-learning experienced a particular approach to e-learning that was flawed during the covid-19 pandemic restrictions. The e-learning they experienced was an attempt to replicate in-person schooling online. It was poorly executed, it was poorly planned, it was done in a rush under extreme circumstances, and it was temporary, so there was little effort to improve the experience. e-learning, when done well, is not at all what most people think of when their children were home, staring at screens all day while harried teachers desperately tried to implement a completely different approach to learning. There is much more to online learning than local school districts implementing e-learning temporarily due to exigent circumstances. When done well, e-learning does not look like what you experienced in the past.

Overall, e-learning isn’t any better or worse than any other kind of learning. Similarly, in-person learning isn’t inherently superior to e-learning. They are different, with different strengths and weaknesses, and require different approaches and skills. Just like anything other product or service, e-learning can be poor, mediocre, good, or even fantastic, depending on the implementation. Successful e-learning programs depend heavily on the expertise and skills of the administrators and teachers in the program. It requires different professional development, different approaches to teaching, different use of technology, different classroom management approaches, and different levels of family and community support. In fact, in-person schools attempting to do online learning is a classic product differentiator problem. Their strength is the in-person, highly structured social learning experience. Trying to replicate an in-person school experience through an online solution loses the aspects that differentiate in-person school from others, and it is an unmitigated disaster. (Similarly, when e-learning solutions try to move towards in-person, they lose their differentiator and fail too.)

e-learning, when done well, is not one long online meeting with students trying to stay engaged while staring at a computer screen all day. There is a mix of activities that includes some in-camera meeting time in a virtual classroom with a teacher, virtual collaboration with other students, and activities students perform off camera on their own. There are instructional videos, virtual manipulatives, activities and games they can use to complete schoolwork and assignments when they choose. As adults, we often have to attend virtual meetings for work, and spend an entire day staring at virtual meeting screens, or even worse, sitting through professional training webinars where we feel bored and exhausted. It turns out that it doesn’t have to be that way, and there are a lot of technology solutions and teaching approaches that can create a fun, engaging and rewarding online learning environment.

The super power of e-learning can be found in its flexibility that is provided by technology. This enables flexibility of location, timing and schedules. These open spots during a learning day that are freed up for e-learners can be filled with specialized activities and additional learning opportunities depending on individual need. Conversely, a lack of flexibility in e-learning means it will fail.

In short, there is nothing inherently good or bad about e-learning, just as there is nothing inherently good or bad with in-person learning. Each approach can be done extremely well, each approach can be done extremely poorly. At the time of writing, they are very different approaches that serve completely different user needs. Understanding the differences on how to find out the best approach for you and your children requires being open to studying each of these offerings based on their strengths and weaknesses and how each one will fit your current needs. That requires understanding the product differentiator.

What’s Your Product Differentiator?

As a product manager, I am always asking questions to determine why people like to use our products and services. I always ask: “What is our product differentiator?” Or in other words, what is unique about our product and service that gets the attention of the people who will want to use it? Without a differentiator, we will have a small, limited market at best, or no one using what we are offering, at worst. This sounds simple, but the vast majority of organizations I work with struggle when they try to answer it clearly. After extensive research, interviewing parents, and some intense analysis, I will offer my answer to this question. The differentiator with e-learning is simple, but varied and rich.

The product differentiator for e-learning is flexibility in learning.

Flexibility in learning is a vague term, and there are different aspects of flexibility that are important to families and learners. Flexibility in learning includes flexibility in:

• location: can learn anywhere
• time: can complete much of their work at different times during the day
• sources of information: online experts, community experts, libraries, learning management systems, family and friends
• teaching approaches and expertise: professional school teachers specializing in e-learning, private teachers and tutors, family members, community members
• online resources: how to videos, lectures, learning tools, applications, games, collaboration tools
• learning environments: home, workspaces, when travelling, etc
• extracurricular activities: free play, sports, dance, art, music, science, create spaces
• technology for learning: supply your own or utilize what you can access that works best
• approach: full time e-learning, or part time homeschool, hybrid, modular, etc

Flexibility in some of the areas listed above are what makes e-learning so powerful for certain families. In fact, could write entire blog posts about each bullet point above. A mix of these items is what makes it so attractive and useful for them. Not having to travel to a school building each day can be attractive for many, since students can learn from home, and they aren’t losing time each day to commuting. Families that like to travel can have productive learning time from literally anywhere in the world. e-learning takes local education expertise and knowledge and distributes it, thanks to technology. Furthermore, technology enhances sources of information for learning, as well as providing alternative approaches for learning. If I had to pick one though, it would be flexibility in a daily e-learning schedule. The more time students have to work on supplemental activities, the more the family can customize the learning experience to better suit the individual.

Here is an example. The Smith family have decided to travel in Europe for two months to visit family and sight see. They value experiences in education and feel their children’s education shouldn’t be bound to a classroom. Sightseeing and enjoying world class heritage sights, historical locations, art collections and museums can be important educational activities. However, they can only do this during the school year due to costs and work timing for the parents. Taking their kids out of school for two months would be very disruptive, so they sign up for an e-learning service for their children. While they have to cope a bit with time differences for mandatory sessions in-camera with their teachers and classmates, these are short, and do not take up the majority of their learning day. Once they finish their assignments for the day, they can enjoy exploring the Louvre with their family for the afternoon. However, one of the children is having trouble with multiplying fractions, and doesn’t understand what the teacher was showing them in class. They ask their parent for help, who quickly realizes explaining how to multiply fractions is actually really hard, and while they can do it, they can’t address the questions their child has. They decide to discover an alternative approach together, and search on Youtube for a good explanation. After two or three videos that don’t help, they stumble on a math teacher’s account, and they have just the right explanation that resonates with the child. They show manipulatives with colorful visualizations, and explain in such a way that it seems simple. The child returns to their required math work for the day, and tries again. An alternative explanation to what the teacher in school was providing supplemented the provided information, and a child went from feeling lost and frustrated to feeling like they understood the assignment. That flexibility in sources of information and access to experts is a huge win for them today.

The Smith family were also motivated to try e-learning because their other child had trouble with bullying at school. This child is neurodivergent, and found the classroom experience difficult. Administration did the best they could to deal with the bully, but the bullying shifted from the classroom to the cafeteria, to change rooms for PE, practice rooms for band, study areas and the library, to off school property and the bus ride home. While teachers and administrators at the school were concerned and did their best, the parents of the bully didn’t care, and there was only so much they could do. Due to their neurodivergence, the child also had trouble staying still in class, and some teachers found them disruptive. Some teachers would provide accommodation, or would use group work and have students move around, while others would kick the child out of class if they were having trouble staying still. Eventually, the in-person school experience became distressing, was a source of extreme stress. The “socialization” aspect of in-person schooling was a negative experience.

In short, a safe learning environment had become an unsafe learning environment. A student who loved school, got excellent grades started to suffer with failing grades, and feeling sick each morning on every school day, begging parents to stay home. e-learning provided an opportunity to create a safer environment where the child could learn without fear of bullying, or reprisals for not being able to stay still. The alternative learning space allowed for movement when learning, to avoid extremely negative in-person experiences, and they and the parents could control their social interactions in a more healthy way. The online teachers didn’t care if they needed to stand up and move while listening to a math lecture, or if they wanted to listen to their favorite music when doing their math homework. Instructors also allowed them to turn their camera off if they were having a difficult day, and if they were in a collaborative environment that was difficult, they could leave the virtual room and ask for help. Inclusivity of a student with unique needs is much more easily addressed with a product or service whose differentiator is flexibility in learning.

The flexibility in the learning environment that e-learning depends on, is all but impossible for in-person. That flexibility allowed a student to change their negative school experience into a positive experience before they were lost to anxiety, apathy, and losing faith in getting an education altogether. The flexibility of e-learning is in contrast to the rigidity of in-person schooling. The flexibility of e-learning is what makes it great, you can tailor the experience for the family and child’s needs. Alternatively, the planned, structured, inflexible approach that in-person schooling depends on is what makes it work so well. While each approach gets kids in and out of the process with an education, they come at it from completely different approaches. They are at opposite ends of a spectrum, with a lot of variety of combinations in between.

One major function of in-person school in addition to education is child care, housing the most kids in the most cost effective way as possible to free the parents up to work. In addition, students learn social skills by being around others, and working within structured environments helps prepare them for work and other activities required by adults. Publicly funded in-person school also allows for centralization of education control, to ensure that there is a minimal standard being met. The community and individual families outsource their children’s education to the school system, who determines curricula, hires people with expertise to teach and train, and manages the safety and logistics of the school experience. The rigidity of in-person school means they have a large degree of control over what children are exposed to, what students learn, and they provide a standardized approach that is predictable and measurable.

This is a one-sized fits most solution, which is focused on educating children to become the adults we need to work and contribute to our society. However, we are asking a lot of schools who are faced with increased budget pressure and are being asked to do more with less. Schools need to provide safe childcare, a well rounded education, socialization, physical activity, and a sense of what it means to follow the rules and norms of community. That is a tremendous amount to ask of one institution.

Increasingly, parents are frustrated with public in-person schools that are so poorly funded they are unable to meet all of those needs, so they augment school with activities they seek out and enrol their children in, or they pull them from public in-person school altogether. Often, these students move to private schools, to religious schools, or alternative schools like Montessori or Waldorf, homeschool, or unschooling approaches. Rather than entrench in the face of competition and demand everyone return to in-person, state run schools, there are options if you look at the competitive market. Public schools can increase their market share by providing the best in-person schools they can, and by creating, staffing and implementing fantastic e-learning solutions as well. They have different strengths and weaknesses and will appeal to different customers. Merely copying and pasting what you do in-person and trying to make that virtual won’t work, but you can still leverage a lot of what you already know and work with, and provide families and students with a solution to school that is more suited to their needs. Furthermore, since the current public school model was designed in a bygone era to help provide factory workers, e-learning can help to prepare knowledge workers that are more suited to the modern economy and current society. That said, both in-person schools and e-learning school solutions can both improve by focusing on their differentiators and working to do better. It just requires the will to solve the right problems, adequate funding, and not spreading the solutions too thin. Rigidity is easier to manage, but flexibility appeals to those that buck the system. Increasingly, families and members of society are searching for individualized solutions, and unique approaches to difficult problems.

How I Determined the Product Differentiator

Now let’s back up a bit and see how we got to this answer. Time to show my work.

As I mentioned before, clearly stating a product differentiator sounds obvious, but it isn’t an easy question to answer. When you ask the people who design, develop, build and sell the product, they often struggle. In many cases, the question is met with derision. “Of course we understand what we are building and providing!” But what feels right, intuitively to individuals who are thinking about it can quickly fall apart when you actually write it down and try to share with others. Suddenly, writer’s block kicks in, and once people have a statement written down, they are shocked to see their coworkers have different ideas of what the company is providing altogether. This happens because they are too close to it, and get focused on the details of what they see every day.

An obvious solution to this problem is to ask the people who use your product and service, and why. However, when you ask the people who use your products and services, they may not have the expertise to answer the question adequately. Similarly to the people who build and provide the product, they may have intuitive thoughts in their head that are difficult to explain to someone else. Often when you poll end users, they all seem to have different answers. Many of the people who use our things aren’t able to clearly articulate why, even though they may feel strongly about using them. Our products and services address a need they have, and they depend on it. Beyond that, without expertise in product placement, marketing, sales, and clear communication skills around those concepts, it is a difficult question to answer. Put another way, if we are having trouble answering that question ourselves, it can be too much to expect for people who don’t study and work in product to tell us what we need to hear.

There are a lot of tools we can use to help cope with this. When you talk to people who use your things, themes will appear. I have often printed out questionnaire or interview answers from customers, read them over and over, and watched for patterns. While there may be different language and examples provided, certain themes will appear as you summarize. I will write the themes out, then use different color highlighter in the printed answers to find each one. Answers that don’t seem to fit those themes can be set aside for the moment. At this point, seemingly differing thoughts and opinions start to converge around tangible ideas that we can then use to discern why people like our product or service, and why they use it. Sometimes though, this effort doesn’t provide any new insight. Sometimes, there is a key reason expressed by just one end user that encapsulates what we do. That is extremely difficult to find while going over all the different things people have said to you. And sometimes, you end up with some interesting ideas and opinions, but nothing at all that you can use to help identify your product differentiator.

Often, you have to identify a product differentiator by using analysis and good old fashioned problem solving. In other words, you have to figure it out yourself first, then test to see whether you understand it or not.

Systems thinking in product analysis is a powerful tool, because it allows you to expand your perceptions. Instead of looking at a system or a product in a familiar way, you use a thinking tool to change your perspective. Often, we get entrenched in a particular view of something because that is what we are familiar with. One of my consultant tricks is to question my own suggestions and solution ideas. One of my mentors used to say that if you couldn’t think of three ways your solution idea will fail, you don’t understand the problem space well enough. Entrenched positions on topics based on individual experience is what leads to polarization. Since all you are exposed to or permit yourself to be exposed to are ideas that reinforce your position, other ideas seem strange, or even threatening. Let’s use education as an example. Parents want the best education for their children, but as parents, our views of education are heavily influenced by what we experienced when we went through it. When a child brings home a problem to work on, and the student is being taught an unfamiliar problem solving approach, many parents feel surprised and threatened by it, because they aren’t familiar with alternative approaches. They learned a particular way, they don’t understand this new way, and that can bring up a lot of negative emotions.

Using a Tetrad

When you work with me on software products, you’ll likely see me use a systems thinking tool called a tetrad. I use thinking tools like this to help see a problem from different perspectives. Usually when we analyze something, we latch on to our best idea, and think about the positive outcomes of applying that idea. We rarely look at how that idea can fail, because it’s threatening and hard. However, looking at failure is a powerful observation tool. Canadian Philosopher Marshall McLuhan, thought about embracing failure to help solve problems, and his approach to analyzing media has repercussions that are felt today. McLuhan analyzed mass media using a tetrad model, using four main areas to analyze media. He would look to see where current media solutions were failing, and that helped him “predict the future” by generating ideas on how the current failure modes would lead to new solutions. It was a simple systems thinking exercise combined with some science fiction style brainstorming on what might be used to solve the current problems. McLuhan believed that the use of new technology to address the problems faced by current technology would show us the future. He was often right. I use a slightly modified McLuhan Tetrad for product analysis.

The tetrad us an analysis tool that prompts us to ask 4 different kinds of questions about the concept we are studying. In product analysis, we ask these questions and brainstorm about a product or service. Here are my modified tetrad questions regarding a product:

What does the product:

• enhance or improve? What are the benefits of our product or service?
• make obsolete? What products does this product or service replace or make irrelevant?
• retrieve from the past? What products or features that have fallen out of use are brought back?
• look like when it reverses or deteriorates? How does the product fail?

We can answer these questions for e-learning as a product.

e-learning Enhances

What are the benefits of e-learning?

• can learn from anywhere
• can learn from anyone
• flexible schedule
• control over the learning environment
• can access many teachers and experts using technology
• alternative lessons and explanations of concepts available online
• various media of information: visualization, video, apps, games, demos, animations, manipulatives
• apps and workspaces for safe exploration (can experiment virtually before committing answers)
• safety in learning environment and social environments, safe places for learning exploration
• easier to schedule alternative learning activities
• greater visibility and insight into what is being taught and learned
• more time for extracurricular activities

Example: A family who lacks transportation options enrols in e-learning because the school in their district is overcrowded. They are a single income family and can’t afford to drive their children to the school they have been assigned because they only have one vehicle, and don’t want their children on a school bus for an hour and a half each day. The parent who stays home is able to support the children’s e-learning while the other goes out to work. After a while, they see benefits of e-learning and are pleased with their children’s academic performance. Furthermore, since there is no commute for the children, they have more time for playing outside at the local park, and to explore hobbies.

e-learning Replaces/Obsolesces

What does e-learning replace?

• in-person only education
• single teacher or instructor per topic
• fixed physical space for school
• limited sources of information

Example: A student finds a particular science unit interesting, and finds they do well on assignments and want to learn more. They find videos by a NASA scientist that they devour in between in-camera class time and school assignments. They decide to learn more, and ask their parents and teachers for help finding activities. The parents purchase an app subscription to study the topic more deeply, and the teachers assign an extra research project they can leverage for extra points in school. Th eteacher has an industry contact who points the student to books and tools they can utilize further. The student uses expert videos online, applications, library access, as well as parent and teacher knowledge.

e-learning Retrieves

What features from past approaches to education does e-learning bring back?

• community education
• apprentice model

Prior to publicly-funded, government mandated and controlled education, communities educated their children in various ways. They learned from local people with expertise, starting with their family, then to others with different education such as religious leaders, expert workers in a guild, and people with specialized knowledge from jobs. While you can still utilize these sources of knowledge with in-person school after school and on weekends, it is much easier to do with e-learning since you can incorporate it in the student’s school day.

Example: A student is struggling with writing clearly. The parents have a friend who is a professional writer who used to work as a teaching assistant when they were in grad school. Several days a week, they provide 15 minute online coaching sessions with the student to help show them how to improve. They provide feedback on writing the student is working on for school, they show them examples, and point them to other people and resources they can use to learn more.

e-learning Reverses/Fails

How does e-learning fail?

• long days spent entirely in meetings.
• copying in-person experiences: virtualizing every social event in-person provides
• not engaging enough, so students turn to other virtual tools such as social media, tv/movies, video games, etc.
• distracting learning environments at home
• not enough physical activity and in-person socialization opportunities
• behaviour issues. Classroom management breaks down, or students find it difficult to learn virtually, etc.
• lack of supervision. younger children with inadequate home supervision may not do assigned work, or may not participate during in-camera time
• students not doing the work themselves: cheating, parents or other adults doing too much to “help”, etc.
• lack of access to technology

Example: A family who travels a lot find themselves with an e-learning program that starts to increase online meetings, and has short, inflexible deadlines on assignments. Instead of being able to work remotely and learn from the travel experience, the children spend upwards of 6 hours a day in online meetings. They find it tiring, and they have to be up at odd hours to do their work, missing out on the cultural, historical learning experience of the place they are currently staying.

Another way that e-learning can fail is due to externalities such as funding. Even though we can analyze e-learning as a product, publicly funded schools often have little say in how they operate, and face pressure from school boards, governments, and other groups that decide curricula, funding, staffing, resources, etc. If these groups have a negative perception of e-learning, or they overstep and try to control it by making it more like what they were used to attending in-person school when they were kids, they can cause e-learning to fail in various ways. They can cut funding, they can make demands on how e-learning is presented, they can push tools and resources that aren’t engaging for students, or aren’t compatible with online learning, and more.

Example: A family whose child has special needs is thriving in an e-learning environment. After a psycho-educational assessment, they were unable to get funding at the school for assistance for their child. Once they moved to an e-learning solution, they were able to create a learning environment at home that fit their child’s needs better. In the time saved during the day from a commute, and the sheer amount of time students need to wait for others, or move from classroom to classroom, etc, they were able to schedule therapy and other aid sessions during the school day. However, the local school administration for that district decide that e-learning is not worth funding, and start to interfere and starve funding. They demand more in-person style activities, they demand more formal testing, and they set minimum classroom times for each day. The effects of this are children who have to be in-camera, in meetings at scheduled times for longer periods during the day. This neuro-divergent child who was able to manage a few short in-camera meetings a day, plus work to do on their own, but with a schedule that allowed for expert coaching and intervention, suddenly finds themselves regressing and unable to cope with school, once again.

Further Analysis

When I interviewed people about e-learning, a lot of the negativity came from experiencing or hearing about failed approaches. The thought of your own child sitting in videoconferencing all day long, and filling in virtual worksheets does not sound like an education solution anyone would want to experience. It’s boring, it’s demotivating, it’s exhausting, it’s downright unhealthy. These parents viewed school from a child-care perspective. Someone is looking after my child and teaching them all day, only it is virtual.

Conversely, a lot of the positivity came from parents who have experienced successful models, and supplement e-learning with things they want their child to experience that in-person school doesn’t address very well. These parents were in a position to provide child care (home or travel learning environment, supplement extracurricular activities, provide guidance and direction as needed, etc.) Those with teaching expertise are caring for my child and teaching them for part of the day, the rest of the day is up to us to fill with what our values and needs as a family require. In other words, they need a minimum of supervised time, and the rest of the day they need e-learning to stay out of the way, so they can capitalize on a dynamic schedule that they could fill with other activities.

Focusing on the negative is the secret sauce of finding a differentiator, and three categories of failure modes emerged. Those that are due to a lack of childcare and/or technology to enable e-learning, problems the school can work on themselves to provide a better product, and problems that are existential, or threaten the product itself. A lack of childcare options at home, or access to PC and internet technology means that a certain part of the population are excluded from e-learning. For these families and students, in-person is the only choice they have at this time. For other families and students, the implementation of the product on behalf of the school has an impact on their experience. Dealing with engagement, scheduling, classroom management, utilizing technology tools, training parents or other adults on how to be good learning coaches, dealing with cheating, etc are things under the school’s control to address and improve. For the schools themselves, the ways in which they approach e-learning has a huge impact on whether they will succeed or fail. One theme emerged over and over, when e-learning tried to mimic in-person learning, it failed in various and spectacular ways. Analyzing this is what led me to the product differentiator: flexibility.

Overall, families who choose e-learning have their own unique needs and goals. Indeed, when I interviewed families about why they choose e-learning, I got a whole range of answers that didn’t seem to align at first. Here is a sample of answers.

We utilize e-learning because of:

• disabilities. Our child can’t get to and from a physical school easily.
• neuro divergence support. Our child needs extra support for their learning disability that the in-person school can’t provide.
• health concerns. Our family needs to isolate more while a family member is undergoing cancer treatments.
• safety. The school building is so old and outdated that it is causing sick building syndrome.
• convenience. Our family doesn’t want to worry about getting kids to and from a physical building every school day.
• travel. Our family spends part of the year with family overseas.
• no nearby school. We want a specialized education for our science obsessed child.
• timing. Our child works best in the evenings, and is able to thrive in an environment that fits their own circadian rhythm better.
• supplemental support due to learning challenges and disabilities. Our child has severe dyslexia and was slipping through the cracks in a large classroom.
• student athletes who train and travel. Our child competes internationally, and has a training and travel schedule that doesn’t fit traditional school.
• alternative approaches: homeschool, self directed, unschool, forest school. Our family values child-directed learning, but we lack the teaching expertise to support them thoroughly. Also, we want to make sure they meet local standards so they have all the options they need for post-secondary.
• hybrid schooling approaches: modular, homeschool, blended in-person and e-learning. We need a mix of things to make things work in our family, and part time e-learning supplements that.
• cultural and religious needs. We want our children to learn about their heritage, culture and religious background. We can fit family time with elders in e-learning schedule, in addition to language classes and religious studies.

All of these families have different goals and needs. All of these families will have different goals and outcomes for their children’s education. All of these families will have differing childcare needs during the day. Some will need more or less in-camera, supervised time. However, if you look at what they all have in common, it is flexibility. There are different aspects of flexibility, but the flexibility of e-learning allows the parents to fill in the learning schedule for the day with what their family needs, rather than expecting a school to do it all for them. Furthermore, all of these families could use the exact same e-learning solution to reach their goals. The e-learning solution provides a minimal framework to ensure children are learning the appropriate things at the appropriate time in their education experience, and that they are at a minimal standard.

The most important aspect of flexibility for these parents is flexibility in schedule. Providing a minimal amount of required in-camera/supervised time during thee day, allowing students and families to complete required work on their own time provides opportunities for flexibility everywhere else. The parents are then able to fill in the blanks around that with what each child needs, through their own resources, online resources, community resources, etc.

One of the challenges with e-learning is that it requires families to provide their own childcare during e-learning. The degree of childcare required for each e-learning family is also different. For younger children, an adult needs to be involved a lot more than older children who are literate and can work more on their own. In a family where the adult who is at home but doesn’t have time to be around as much as their child needs requires a different level of child care than a family with an adult who can dedicate themselves full time during a school day. For example, a parent might have a part-time job that has requirements to be met during the day, while acting as their child’s learning coach. In my own research, the amount and level of (virtual) childcare required was the largest source of conflicting needs between families. If you ask a family who are homeschoolers, or a travelling family, they need as little in-camera time as possible. A parent who needs to focus on their own tasks more during the day, such as domestic chores, part time work or volunteer time, etc will require much more (virtual) childcare. If the e-learning provider has more scheduled events during the day, one family will suffer because they will now have to cut out activities they are utilizing for their student. If the e-learning provider reduces in-camera events, the parent who has less time to supervise during the day will have a student who suffers.

The way to harmonize this problem is to provide optional activities for those who need them during the day. The family whose child spends some afternoons at forest school can utilize the minimum required in-camera time, and extend the day with something valuable for their child. The family whose child needs supervised time in the afternoons can attend optional office hours with teachers, optional virtual study halls to work on their homework with others, and optional fun or enrichment events. If you make the entire schedule mandatory, or start enforcing that students be in a particular place at a particular time to a greater and greater extent, the flexibility of the e-learning schedule erodes, which then takes away flexibility in other areas that e-learning students benefit from. Addressing the differing needs of childcare, requires not only expertise and funding, but flexibility with the e-learning product itself. While some might be in-camera, scheduled, supervised activities, others may be assignments or research projects for those who want or need to spend more time. Furthermore, these needs can be dynamic, based on temporary conditions families experience, such as periods of illness, travel, events, etc.

Make Your e-learning Product Better.

Focusing on your product/service differentiator is imperative to improving what you have. Products and services literally live and die based on how well they understand and execute on their differentiators. That said, differentiators are hard work to understand and it is hard to focus teams and organizations on the best features to fulfill the differentiator. Furthermore, many important stakeholders within your organization will have vastly different ideas on what you need to do. Often, the people who control the money have the least informed, but most powerful influence on the product or service. Getting it right can require going against the grain of what organizational leadership is pushing you towards. That said, improving a product or service is simple at its essence.

When I analyze a product or service, I look at three areas to improve:

1. Enhance the good
2. Reduce the bad
3. Strengthen your advantages

In other words, are you:

• reducing problems (user friction, unneeded costs, sources of complaints)
• enhancing good things that you do well (engagement, productivity, utility or fun)
• focusing on your differentiator(s) (providing people with an experience you do better than absolutely anyone else)

In simpler terms, a famous quote from the movie FUBAR is appropriate here: Turn up the good, turn down the suck.

It’s important to look at the problems first, to see what you can easily address to improve what you have. Then look at the positives and what you might add to the product or service as time goes on, to make it even better. For example, we can address:

e-learning problems: friction with schedules, behavior issues, technology problems
e-learning strengths: flexible schedules, rich and varied sources in learning, social collaboration, safety in exploration

However, focusing on the differentiator, especially with the nuanced differentiator of flexibility that e-learning has can be much more difficult at first. Not only do you have to constantly prove the worth of the approach just to get a minimal level of support and funding, the sheer effort involved in keeping the service running is a massive job. However, product analysis can help us here again.

One area McLuhan would focus on for insight was the reversal or failure aspects of a concept. How do they fail? How do they currently fail? What causes them to become ineffective? McLuhan was so good at this analysis, he could describe technology solutions that hadn’t been invented yet, such as a vivid description of what became the world wide web. In our tetrad exercise above, we can see that e-learning loses effectiveness when it becomes less flexible. However, we also see people leaving public school because it doesn’t meet their needs. Future school solutions will likely become more fragmented and individualized, as technology opens up massive sources of expertise and knowledge that is accessible from anywhere. One interesting model of education is https://manisharoses.medium.com/not-school-or-homeschooling-but-modular-learning-5233927f8fc9 A popular current approach to modular learning is to have educational instruction provided virtually by teachers and other learning experts, while socialization, physical activity and other pursuits are managed by the family and students.

Make it Better, Don’t Make it Worse!

You can get feedback from customers on what works, and what doesn’t work for them individually. However, when it comes to product or service features and needs, they tend to express their ideas based on what they know. In education, parents tend to prefer approaches that they know and experienced themselves. Often times this is at odds with what the education system provides today, and what the kids actually want or need. The trick is to look at the gap that isn’t being addressed in the market, and how your product or service addresses it, even when it doesn’t seem to fit what people ask for. Once you have analyzed and focused correctly, the seemingly disparate needs will suddenly sync up. “Oh course! That is exactly what we need! I didn’t know how to say that before!”

There are also powerful stories you can tell about e-learning success that helps center and focus on improving it. There are lots of stories on the variation of learning tools available online that help students overcome difficulties, or specialize in interest areas. There are huge bodies of knowledge online. Since in-person schools were set up in a time when training factory workers was central to society, they are a bit outdated. e-learning on the other hand is more suited to technology centered or knowledge based jobs. Learning how to learn as an adult sets students up for lifelong learning. After all e-learning is how we adults learn on-the-job, etc. Students can get any expert from anywhere to provide insight and learning provided they are publicly available online. Finally, vitual learning environments are absolute havens of safe exploration: solve problems virtually and explore before committing an answer to submit for a grade.

Simple ways to improve your product is to:

• Reduce friction
• Increase engagement
• Understand how competitors fail and how you can address those market gaps

Reducing friction in a product or service can be all encompassing, but worth the effort. If people can work better in an organization, they will be more productive. If students can learn without getting stuck waiting all the time, they will have a better learning experience. If content is more interesting and relevant to the present day needs of students, and in formats they already use and prefer, they will be more likely to utilize it. Finally, finding out how your competitors fail provides opportunities for you to address things they simply cannot.

One area to improve is in how you staff teams. e-learning requires a different approach to teaching, and it requires teachers who not only enjoy teaching virtually, but have utilized professional development to learn how to do it well. One area of research can be found on social media, where popular teachers are talking about how they left in-person teaching and transitioned to e-learning. There are also companies and independent practitioners who train teachers how to transition from in-person to virtual. Learning why these teachers make the transition, what they do to be effective to learn how to teach virtually, and even more importantly, learning how to attract that talent to your organization can go a long way into both reducing friction and increasing engagement in your e-learning offering. They aren’t difficult to find if you search on social media.

Another area to improve is in the use of technology. Using virtual manipulatives, how to videos, games, and other activities that utilize technology effectively can really help reduce friction and increase engagement. Using the machine to enhance student activities, rather than creating virtual copies of worksheets and exams is crucial to providing a better product offering. Visualize problems and solutions, start over and redo, speed of processing power aids exploration.

Virtual tools are great because you can change your answer easily. There is no eraser on paper required, no rcrumpling up an exam, or squishing a clay and starting over. Students can experiment and have richer learning experiences because they can show and tell safely online. They don’t have to commit until they are ready, even within an examination or group assignment context.

Variation of approaches with a huge amount of knowledge and training opportunities. If you want to learn something, you can read, you can watch videos, you can try activities, you can play games, etc. If one method doesn’t work, you can find another until the right combination f or you appears. Looking for tools that create better virtual meetings, group projects, recording and sharing videos of public speaking, creating and sharing projects, as well as artistic and other endeavours are great sources of increasing engagement.

This is an amazing aspect of e-learning. You have a potentially unlimited amount of approaches, teachers and methods of understanding. In traditional school, you were limited by your teachers, your assignments, your textbooks your library, your friends and family. Online learning expands this so you can find something that helps you get unstuck, or meet a challenge, or really master a topic that no one around you has any ability to help you with.

One area to explore to improve e-learning experiences is to look at competitors. An obvious competitor to e-learning is in-person learning. It is extremely tempting to try to copy what works well for in-person and replicate that virtually. However, it is impossible from a logistics and user experience perspective, and it is a fools errand from a product perspective. Instead of focusing on your differentiator and enhancing and improving what you do well, you will try to copy someone else’s differentiator, and you will always, always fail. Rather than trying to replicate what in-person schools are doing, think of them as products and services that address a completely different market. You don’t want those customers because they don’t need what you have to offer. Instead, you need to attract the customers who need your offering, and they will get value from it.

Bottom line: Embrace your e-learning market, and reject your competitor’s in-person market.

A simple way to analyze your competition to help grow your own market share is to find areas where they fail. Why are parents pulling their children from in-person public schools? What do you offer that might appeal to them or meet their needs? This information isn’t difficult to find, there are articles and posts all over social media where parents complain about public school, and sing the praises of alternatives they are using. Rather than trying to draw away people who use in-person school, focus on those who are leaving or have already left.

For those families who are outside of the public school system, look for opportunities to enhance what they are doing. Part time e-learning can have a huge impact on homeschool families for example, or families looking for a blend of approaches. One of the biggest weaknesses of homeschooling is a skill gap. Parents who aren’t professional teachers can only do so much to help their children get an education. Furthermore, part time e-learning from your local school district ensures your child isn’t behind for their grade level, or they meet standardized requirements for post secondary or other programs upon graduating.

To learn more about expanding your market and improving your differentiator, find people who are leaving in-person learning and learn from them. Are they administrators and teachers? What motived them? How did they learn to excel as e-learning professionals. Are they parents and families? What specific aspects were lacking in in-person school? Finally, see how you can easily address both of these groups because they compose a completely different, and growing market for you to focus your e-learning solution.

Competition for Students

For adults, the obvious competition is alternative education programs that focus on us, the adult decision makers. But who are the competitors to e-learning when you focus on the people who are using the product day in and day out, the children? Students use technology all the time for social interactions (social media, communications apps), gaming (video game apps), and watching movies and tv (streaming). In fact, lately, a lot of media time is spent decrying the problems that smartphones are causing in school. While banning them outright during class time is one potential solution, historically, prohibition doesn’t work that well. Another approach is to find out why we are losing our customers to online activities our children engage in, and see if we can address those with our product offering.

All students whether they are in-person or virtual learners face competition from online activities such as streaming, social media and video games. Video games are interesting because they are well studied from a product perspective, and I have personal experience working in that space. As for the use of video games capturing our students attention, in-person schools have absolutely no hope or redeeming qualities to compete. E-learning solutions can at least provide virtual alternatives that may not be as exciting or compelling as video games, but they can utilize the underlying mechanisms of video games to improve their learning experiences.

There is a trap here though that our adult brains think is the ideal solution: the gamification of school. Unfortunately, trying to make school into a game isn’t going to work very well. For one, we have no hope of competing directly with game shops who have huge budgets and teams of experts. Also, our kids are smart. They will see through this quickly and realize it isn’t what the adults are trying to sell them.Furthermore, the simple, popular approaches to gamification such as points, badges, leaderboards (PBL) have limited long term effectiveness. Instead of trying to make school into a game, we can instead analyze the mechanics of games and see what makes them so effective, then bring those aspects into our e-learning solution. This is a game inspired design approach. Instead of trying to make all learning into a game, we look at elements of games, study them, and apply similar approaches to our non-game solution. Game-inspired solutions rarely contain video game technology directly, but are heavily influenced by game design.

In fact, one of my secret tools as a product manager is to use game inspired analysis and design in most of the applications I work with. Most people never know that I am using game mechanics, beause I don’t try to make it look like a game. Instead, I try to get the end results that games are so effective at, even if it is an accounting application or for recording time sheets. When I am working on a game, or game-like solution, then the visualization is different, but the process and underpinnings are the same.

Here are some underpinning mechanics of what make games compelling:

• entertaining content
• social connections and collaboration
• challenges, meaningful struggle
• achievements and recognition
• visible progress and feedback
• normalize making mistakes (mistakes are fun, not sources of anxiety)
• safe places to explore, fail, try again, repeat, succeed
• clear, figure-outable tasks
• visual progress and feedback

All of these items can be easily addressed with e-learning solutions. It just takes a bit of professional development, research, and applying tools to get the results you are looking for. Even socialization needs can be addressed virtually, the social bonds that children facilitate and experience online are powerful and compelling. While they never replace in-person social interactions, they can be implemented in effective ways. Social collaboration in games can be fascinating to study. MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) can have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people working together to reach a goal. The project management, social co-ordination and people skills required are immense and under studied.

One important aspect of games is that everyone can learn without feeling judgment or shame, so you can explore and learn from your mistakes. Rather than only rewarding getting things right all the time, players iterate towards the correct answer rather than feel pressure to be correct all the time. Mistakes help you learn, and help you make progress to reach goals within the game. Mistakes are incorporated in game play in various ways. They are learning opportunities, but can also provide a sense of randomness to make things more interesting, or silliness to reduce a stressful situation, or to make things fun.

Digital mediums provide perfect opportunities for learning without real world consequences. If games can exploit this, why can’t digital learning experiences also take the stress out of making mistakes?

Another vital aspect of games is that game designers understand the various user types of their customers, and design accordingly. Gamification consultant Andrzej Marczewski created a breakdown of game player types that I have adapted and use in my product analysis and design work:

• Achiever: driven by completion and gratification. They like leaderboards, visible status, and progression to understand what to do next, and what they
  have left to complete.
• Gatherer: collects items in a game such as utilities, points, health, objects, status items and wealth.
• Explorer: enjoys finding the limits of a game and experimenting with the boundaries. They want to experience different things from a sensory perspective,
  and find out alternate workflows that others may not use or know about. They often find shortcuts, bugs or cheats. Map based games appeal to explorers, but so do learning
  based games.
• Socializer: craves social connections, and interaction. They like to communicate and interact with others when they play.
• Philanthropist: loves to help and share. They will coach newbies, team up with others to guide and share knowledge, and they will send in-game gifts to
  others, even people they have never met or interacted with before.
• Disruptor: is motivated by change. They can be unpredictable in game, and will force changes that could be positive of negative. Some disruptors are
  griefers who get pleasure from seeing others lose in the game, and will actively work to sabotage others, and even themselves if they are bored enough. (Griefing is a huge
  part of a lot of games, and the disruption can be a fun outlet, or it can be destructive, if it isn’t incorporated in designs.)

It doesn’t require much creativity to see how these relate to students. In fact, with a bit of thought, a teacher could probably identify each of these player types as students who are motivated exactly the same way in learning environments. In fact, I have had success using game mechanics and applying gamer user types when working with learning and educational apps. The crossover is compelling and useful.

Once again, I am barely scratching the surface here, but it should be obvious that analyzing why games are popular, figuring out motivations for playing games, and what features children find engaging is helpful to improve our e-learning offering. We have a fighting chance to meet children where they are, to create compelling alternatives to playing games, or socializing or watching TV, because we are starting with the same technology platform these activities depend on. When we pivot towards exploiting the technology to its fullest, rather than copying two dimensional worksheets and long “I do, you do, we do” lectures, we can do something unique and effective. We can do things in-person just can’t do, just like they can do things we will never match.

Conclusion

The super power of e-learning can be found in its flexibility that is provided by technology. This enables flexibility of location, timing and schedules. These open spots during a learning day that are freed up for e-learners can be filled with specialized activities and additional learning opportunities depending on individual need. Conversely, a lack of flexibility in e-learning means it will fail.

While the differentiator for e-learning is nuanced, it is simply based on flexibility, and exploiting technology to provide the best possible solution to families and learners. The customers of e-learning are split between parents and children, and is overseen by government and other regulatory agencies. To get students enrolled in e-learning requires parental decision and buy-in based on how e-learning meets needs in-person is not currently addressing. Students are the recipients and users of the product and they need to find it compelling and useful. All of this must be done within a political, legal and regulatory framework regarding safety, privacy, and following an approved curriculum with measurable standards. While this is an unusual situation from a product perspective, it requires two interrelated approaches. Parents need to understand the product differentiator and lose the negative perception of e-learning. This means messaging around how e-learning is not just virtualized in-person school, and with examples to show how it is different and how it relates. For e-learning to succeed for the students, it needs a degree of flexibility, and focused expertise, and to make it a venerable competitor to the online activities that capture the majority of our children’s attention. These are easily achievable with some creative problem solving, good marketing and PR, and old fashioned hard work.

It’s important to note that if your differentiator becomes muddled and your e-learning solution fails, many families will not return to your district’s in-person solutions. Instead, they will find a different e-learning provider in another location. After all, with powerful videoconferencing solutions, learning management solutions, videos, reading materials and hands-on experiments, people can get great educational experiences and outcomes from anywhere in the world. We are no longer limited by what we can provide in a physical location. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can offer fantastic alternatives. If we aren’t, someone else most certainly is.