This content was created by Nir Eyal. This content was uploaded by Nir Eyal. This is a YouTube video titled "How to make education products more habit-forming" featuring Nir Eyal answering a question from Steph about making educational experiences more engaging and habit-forming. The video, created on April 4, 2016, discusses the challenges of online education and offers solutions to improve engagement and completion rates.
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Today's question of the day is from Steph, who asks about how to make educational experiences more habit forming. So this is a question near and dear to my heart. I was an AmeriCorps volunteer, so I've been in the school system. So thanks for the question, Steph, near and dear. Oh, you caught that one, huh? So let's start with the bad news. Two pieces of bad news when it comes to habit forming educational experiences. The first is that most educational experiences online are awful. I mean really, really bad. And you don't have to take my word for it. Just look at the completion rates for online educational experiences. It's horrible. Like in the single digits. Now why is that? Why do so few people complete these online education courses? I'll get to the reason why in just a second. But let me give you the other piece of bad news. The other piece of bad news is that I don't know if you can make online educational experiences habit for me in the first place. Remember, the definition of a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. And that's not exactly what you want in an educational experience. You want people to be fully engaged. So the trouble with most online education is that it's just somebody talking, right? It's just a video of some sage on a stage giving a lecture that's really boring. That might work offline because in an offline setting it's kind of rude to leave in the middle of a class. There's social pressure, social deviance that keeps people in their chairs. But online you can forget it. Because when Facebook and Twitter and email are just a click away, people leave. And so if your content isn't super interesting, people bounce. So here's my two part solution to making online education better. First, make the action easier. Right now, online education is too hard, particularly when it comes to this time component of watching boring videos. Keep the videos real short, real snappy, sort of like a Snapchat video. Hey, you're still watching, right? Let's just go ahead and kill the expectations that students should watch an hour long video online. That's just too much to ask. The second thing we should do is to engage more variable rewards. And I can think of two ways of doing that. The first is to engage rewards of the tribe. These rewards we get from other people. And when we think about the Socratic method, it's all about engaging in discussion with others. But most online education is just a video. It's a one way conversation. There's not that much interaction with your peers. When we look at who's doing this really well in the education space, companies like Minerva, they have this online interactive discussion that I think more companies should look into. The next thing we should do is engage rewards of the hunt. Now remember, education should be fun. Learning should be interesting. It's naturally a variable reward. And the way we engage Rewards of the hunt is to make online learning project based. It should all be based on assignments with some kind of output that we get to show our peers. Right now, most online education only utilizes one of the three what I call rewards of the self. This mastery completion component is great, but it's all they use. So I hope I've given you a few ideas there, Steph, on how to make education more habit for me. And if you have a question, please ask me over Snapchat. And as always, you can find me@nearndfar.com and on Twitter.
