When a student buys a course, they do so for a specific purpose. This may include a better job, a chance to develop skills, a promotion, solving problems, or any other personal goal that will benefit from the course. Students finish purchasing, receive an email, and add the course to a long to-do list for later.
A conversion is something that EdTech teams can consider successful. The company receives revenue and counts another conversion. But the learner hasn't learned anything yet.
EdTech teams should focus on this gap. EdTech teams consider conversion, activation, engagement, and completion important indicators that show how many people purchased a product, completed a key action, returned to the website, and finished the course.
Learners can disappear before reaching these indicators. Many learners stop before clicking the play button. They can be lost due to poor onboarding, complicated course design, setup, and many other reasons.
Buying a Course Is Easier Than Starting One
A purchase of an educational program happens in just a few minutes. Getting started with the course takes time, attention, and effort. This is the reason why a good sales page can generate many customers who won't become active learners.
The act of purchase itself can give a feeling of progress. A customer finds a course that promises them a useful result, envisions this result, and buys it. There appears certainty in this action. A choice is made. The difficulty starts when a person needs to open their course and start working.
Another point is that students buy courses not only now but for themselves in the future. A learner envisions the next week where they would have more energy and free evenings for studying because there would be no other commitments. In reality, work goes overtime, children appear, and another obligation is more important. A bought course remains untouched.
Marketing efforts may increase the gap between purchase and learning even further. Offers, discounts, countdown timers, launch windows, and bonuses that come with a course encourage people to buy before they decide on a study schedule. These actions help boost sales but can attract people with poor follow-up plans.
A course itself can become another obstacle for learning. It can happen when someone purchases a 30-hour data analytics course late Sunday night. Then, on Monday after work, the person logs in and sees 87 lessons, six modules, three workbooks, and a community. A purchase was easy. The first lesson looks difficult.
The team in EdTech should see a difference between the intent to purchase and the intent to learn. A purchase means interest and willingness to pay for something. Activation proves that a purchase has turned into learning behaviour.
The Main Reasons Students Never Start
Students usually don't drop out of a course due to one specific reason. Multiple small factors accumulate before the first class.
The Course Seems Too Big
A large content volume makes the purchase valuable but can intimidate a new learner. Fifty hours of video, numerous modules, long resources list – all these things mean significant effort. A student with only 20 minutes available each day may put off taking the course until a free evening that never comes.
The creators of a course can ease the pressure on their learners by showing not all the content but the first milestone. "Complete your first 8-minutes lesson" sounds much more appealing than "Join our 12-weeks program".
There Is No Clear First Step
Sometimes dashboards of courses offer multiple elements to learn at once. A student sees videos, workbooks, communities, bonus classes, templates, and setup instructions, but nobody told them what to start with.
The first thing a dashboard has to show is an answer to one simple question: "What should I do now?"
A simple "Start here" button can create less friction than an additional welcome letter.
Motivation Falls Down After Purchasing the Course
A buyer usually buys a product when the motivation to buy it is high. Maybe a student attended a webinar, read about success stories of people, or decided to change their career completely. Motivation can be gone within days if he does nothing to continue.
A course team should help its learners perform some tasks during the first hours after the purchase.
Some Other Activities Become Priority
Work duties, family obligations, and daily routine distract people from their studies. A course without a strict schedule and reminders relies on students' ability to come back and do the assignment.
Setup Process Creates Additional Friction Points
Some courses may require users to download additional applications, register for an account, or download something else before the learning process starts. Every additional step creates an additional opportunity to stop the learning process.
All EdTech companies should remove unnecessary steps and offer additional steps only when a user needs them.
The First 24 Hours Matter More Than Most Course Creators Think
This is usually when students are most motivated. They have picked a class, paid for it, and envisioned their results. EdTech teams must use this window of opportunity to encourage students to take action and start learning. Other commitments (such as work or caring for family members) can quickly distract them.
There is no need to put lots of information at the very beginning of classes. What is needed is an action that is useful to the learner. It can be watching a video lesson, doing a five-minute exercise, planning the schedule of studies, or simply setting everything up. All of them can be activation events.
Weak onboarding flows make learners do things before they start learning. They have paid, received an impersonal letter, set a password, logged into a crowded dashboard, and seen 12 modules of the course without any instructions on where to start. And there are many screens full of decisions.
A good onboarding flow eliminates all these obstacles. The user arrives on a welcome page after checkout. There is one single instruction here: "Start your 7-minute first lesson". It is finished with a small task and some kind of progression. The student understands what they have done and what is going to happen next.
EdTech teams need to define one meaningful action that is considered the beginning of studies. It depends on the product. However, it should not demand too much preparation from students. Moreover, it should be related to the result the student paid for.
Emails and notifications can help achieve this, but they should indicate a follow-up action. A notification that says “Keep learning” offers another option for the student. A notification like “Your first exercise will take six minutes” presents an achievable task.
The objective during the first 24 hours is to turn the buyer into a learner. This small initial success will make it easier to come back to the course.
There should also be a way to measure how long it takes the buyer to get there. It is better to spot problems early on rather than wait several months to see low completion rates.
How Course Design Creates Inactive Students
Course design can cause resistance even before the learning starts. A learner may come motivated but leave right after the first session if it requires too much time, attention, and preparation.
Long Lessons Add to Entry Cost
A 60-minute lesson requires a busy learner to free up an hour before pressing Play. Many will put it off. Smaller lessons make it easier for learners to squeeze some study time during lunch breaks, commuting hours, or evenings. Also, shorter lessons make it easier to return to the studies after a break.
Too Many Lessons Seem Like Extra Work
Course makers like adding additional modules, libraries, reading lists, and additional workshops to add value to the course. Learners can perceive all this as extra work.
Separate the core lessons and the extra materials. Make the learners aware of the shortest route to the result they have paid for.
Students Require Progress Indicators
Students need something that shows they are moving forward in their learning. Progress bars, completed lessons, small milestones, and goals of the module allow the learner to know their current position in the course.
Do not make completion of the whole course the only important goal. A learner in a 12-week course requires checkpoints along the way before 12 weeks.
Make the Action Come Fast
Long introductions and heavy theoretical opening modules can cause delays in first practical results. Give the learner the possibility to do something with the newly acquired knowledge. For example, a coding learner can run the script. A language learner can carry out a short dialogue. A marketing learner can construct one part of a marketing campaign.
Optimize the Course for Mobile Phones
Most students will start class on their phones. Short texts, computer-only tasks, and difficulties downloading or navigating might hinder them.
Try launching the first lesson on a phone within the first five minutes of every session. The learner must be able to launch the course, get an assignment and make some progress.
How EdTech Companies Can Increase Course Activation
Improving activation doesn't mean adding new content. Activation requires facilitating a way to enter and finish the first learning session.
Let's begin with a student's experience right after the purchase. Eliminate all steps that can delay their progress and lead them to the only useful action.
-
The first lesson should be brief. The ideal time is about five to ten minutes. This means that a person can start without allocating an entire evening for learning.
-
The student should have only one next action. Don't use dashboards that ask him to choose a lesson or community, download files, and get bonus material.
-
Eliminate all unnecessary set-ups. The student must be able to start learning without installing any software, filling out profiles or joining additional websites.
-
Indicate their achievements from the first session. Indicate which actions are completed and show the next achievable milestone.
-
Ask about their studying intentions. Even a simple answer like "on Tuesday and Thursday evenings" turns intention into routine.
-
Use behavior-based reminders. Contact the student when he skips the intended session or stops right after the first lesson, but don't just send the same email to everyone.
-
Offer the result of the first lesson. It can be anything useful: a created spreadsheet, a short piece of code, a completed language exercise.
-
Divide the course into smaller goals. Instead of "Complete the course," offer the student "Finish Module 1 this week."
The copy of the reminder also plays a significant role. "Don't forget to continue your course" gives no reason to return, while "Your next lesson will take eight minutes and will teach you how to create your first dashboard" tells the student what to do next and how long it will take.
Every change should simplify the process of restarting.
Metrics That Reveal Your Course Graveyard
The completion rate tells you how many people complete the course. The completion rate does not tell you how many people failed to start their journey. EdTech teams need activation metrics to monitor the first days after purchase.
Monitor these key metrics:
-
Purchase-to-start rate: percentage of people who complete a meaningful learning action.
-
Time to first lesson: difference between purchase and the first lesson or exercise.
-
First-session completion rate: percentage of people who complete the activity they started.
-
Day 1 and Day 7 activation: number of buyers who activate on Day 1 or Day 7.
-
Module 1 drop-off: where students get lost during the beginning of the course.
-
Inactive buyer rate: percentage of customers who pay but do not complete any meaningful learning actions.
These metrics become even more informative once teams segment them.
Compare activation rates by acquisition channel. Paid social campaigns might have many purchases but fewer active learners compared to referrals or organic search. Compare activations of full-price customers with discounted users. See if the mobile users activate at a lower rate than the desktop users.
Comparing courses could also uncover design issues. In case some course has great conversion but low purchase-to-start rate, something might be wrong with its sales page – it might offer an experience different from the one provided on the onboarding flow.
Establish a definition of “started” before collecting any of these data points. Login cannot be considered meaningful activation. Choose an action representing the learning process, for example, completion of the first lesson, submission of an exercise, or completion of a short assessment.
Observe the trend over time. If more people complete that first meaningful action, then your onboarding efforts work.
Conclusion
A purchase tells you that somebody was interested in the results your course could deliver. It does not tell you whether this person turned into a learner.
When building EdTech products, teams must be careful about the time between purchase and the learner's first important action. A complex onboarding flow, huge courses, long lessons, additional configuration, and poor reminders can turn enthusiastic purchasers into non-learners.
It all starts with the first 10 minutes. One action to take: a brief first lesson, progression and some results to obtain. Then you need to track the number of purchasers that started the course, time to start and abandonment points.
Before introducing any additional modules, bonuses or marketing emails, you need to focus on making the start easier.
Course graveyards are filled with products optimized for sales but ignored the post-purchase. Make activation an essential metric of your product.
