Education First EF CAMP

Project: EF Camp

Role: Product Manager @EF Education First Labs

Completed: 2015

Background

One of the major educational projects that I have accomplished as a Product Manager at EF Education First 2013-15.

As a Product Manger, I was responsible for the educational design, learning and content development, academic team management, trialing and evaluation of the EF CAMP product.

The product is outcome of collaborative efforts between the academic, design and technology teams. It is the pinnacle of VIRUS team’s (which I am part of) 2 years of research and exploration in behaviour sciences, learning and motivation theories (e.g. positive deviance, the MATS behaviour model, habit formation, coaching, cognitive apprenticeship etc.). Some research insights have been published on the VIRUS Journal on tumblr (in Chinese).

Product designs

This video (1:20) introduces the educational design concepts of EF CAMP.

EF Camp’s online landing page including topics and product design highlights.

Alarmingly, most students who splash out on annual study subscription become inactive or drop out after the first month. Long-term study plans on comprehensive language proficiency improvements relying on students self motivation have seen very high attrition rate, resulting in paying students not achieving their goals.

EF Camp provides an alternative learning option where students fast-track in relatively intensive 4-6 weeks courses on a fixed topic. Mechanisms are built in aiming at helping learners to achieve their language goals, stay in progress and boost their motivation.

Topic landing page. The Job Interview Camp is one of the three camps developed in the initial product launch. This camp comprises of four topics spanning over four weeks. The short duration of camps and skill-specific topics helps students to hone in on developing specific skills in a short timeframe.

User dashboard. This page has an overview of a student’s learning schedule including appointments for the live sessions, progress of student’s current camp, and all the other camps that the students have subscribed.

Social learning page. Social and peer learning is a core part of CAMP’s learning design. As the final task of each of the two self-study components (i.e. Lesson 1 and Lesson 3), students are required to complete a speaking task by recording a response. They can re-do as many times as they like before submitting. Then the tutor receives the recordings prior to the class and provide initial feedback in the class. At the end of Lesson 3, a follow-up task is designed where students are asked to comment on three of their peers’ recordings (again by recording a message). The tutor monitors all students’ responses and provide feedback in the second live class.

The social learning component enhances students’ motivation by engaging them in peer learning and meaningful and relevant feedback. The bridge activities provide additional link between each pair of the self-study and tutor-led lessons.

EF CAMP educational design is backed by numerous research in online learning behaviour and motivation theories. Each camp is structured as four lock-step lessons consisting of two self-study lessons and two tutor-led live sessions. While the live sessions’ time is on fixed schedule, students can complete the two self-study lessons any time before the class starts. Activities are designed between lessons to enhance their linkage.

The design of two live sessions capitalises on the notion of ‘key events’ – studies found that online students tend to carry out tasks and stick to activities which they associate the most value (i.e. key events). By attributing high values to live sessions and linking self-study to the them, students have shown significantly increased participation rate in both self-study and live sessions.

The following video (2:00) introduces EF CAMP self-study activities, which feature a variety of interactive learning content that draws of EF’s technology to enhance language learning.