Case Study: The Portal - reimagining learning

Founder Sally Burns has been running a content creation business for some years, helping female founders and experts to create beautifully crafted content for their own audiences via the LearnWorlds platform. Sally’s vision to scale this up required a learning platform that emphasises collaboration and connection over completion and content monetisation (which excludes most of the techbro founded platforms), and that exemplifies modern design and ease of use (which sadly excludes many current B2C learning platforms). Sally’s vision is well documented at www.jointheportal.com.

I was delighted that multiple people had recommended me to Sally to help with this project. My role was to help define what the first version of The Portal would look like, conduct a ‘build vs buy’ analysis to establish a way forward, and lead the selection of a product vendor or development agency who could help to make it a reality.

Keeping it lean

The Lean Inception model is a rapid, week-long process that can be used by startups to take an idea that's been tested by some pre-software MVP (which Sally had effectively already done with her existing service) and evolve it into a software product. The rapid user-centred design process incorporates a product vision board, user persona definitions, user journey mapping, feature brainstorming and eventually ending up with an MVP canvas. Built firmly around good old fashioned, user-centred design methodology, the model provided a good basis for defining the next stage of The Portal, and some bright spark had even created a set of Miro templates to speed things up!

Complementing this approach was Roman Pichler’s Product Vision Canvas, I really like the way it neatly captures vision, target market, user needs, product overview, differentiators, and business goals. So that was also plugged into the Lean Inception model to beef up the vision board.

Lean Inception doesn’t get you all the way though. While it serves well for design and vision, it doesn’t handle the important area of product positioning. For this, Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy is perfect (also promoted in Pichler’s book, Strategize, a recommended read for which I owe thanks to Simon Emery who introduced Pichler to me back at Brightwave). The first step involves defining how the general market offering for B2C learning platforms sits across a number of competing factors, followed by defining where the new product's features sit in relation to that. The differentiators in the top right are where we are finding ‘blue ocean’ to swim in. Those blue ocean features are where we should focus most attention on the early build iterations, testing key assumptions and learning as quickly as possible.

Build vs. Buy analysis

Then it was onto exploring the various build options, these included:

• custom development (building the product from scratch)
• no-code/low-code platforms (I had a great call with Matt from Coursensu who has gone down this road for his own product launch)
• off-the-shelf SaaS platforms (ready made platforms for course development and delivery)
• open-source platforms (such as Moodle, Wordpress, Ghost, etc).

A Request for Proposal (RfP) was created to support this activity. We sounded out a bunch of potential partners who specialised in the different build options and about 10 potential partners were spoken to, which was eventually worked down to a final four who responded to the RfP.

We received a range of quotes and eventually went for one that would setup a team locally in Brighton to work closely with Sally, who was keen to collaborate closely but also to support the local economy. The first build is going to cost about ￡50K which is very reasonable for getting a first version into the hands of users. Potential investors were clear they’d like to see a tangible product rather than just ideas, so the first version is key to releasing further funds.

Be the change

After this phase had finished I stumbled across one of those LinkedIn conversations about the 702010 learning design methodology where one person says, “but those numbers are a load of old tosh” and someone better informed replies, “yeah, but it’s not about the numbers, it’s a framework” and linked out to Charles Jenning’s original research. Jennings describes the background to how these numbers came about, concluding that “the final easy-to-communicate meme was: 70% Learning from Challenging Assignments; 20% Learning from Others; and 10% Learning from Coursework. And thus we created the 70-20-10 meme widely quoted still today.” He went on to cite many more studies that have since found similar numbers, but notable in that list was one study that deviated the most from the norm, and this was where the research subjects were ALL women. In this group, the numbers were 58-36-6; the learning from coursework and from challenges were both reduced, and the ‘learning from others’ almost doubled. It emphasises just how much women gravitate towards more social, collaborative learning methods. It really is therefore no great surprise that Sally couldn’t find what she wanted among the world of modern learning platforms dominated by techbro founders and their techbro investors. If anyone ever encapsulated the term, ‘Be the change you want to see’ it is Sally Burns with The Portal.

Content creators who need a female friendly outlet to grow their own community, and potential investors who can see the glaringly obvious opportunity in all of this, please contact [email protected]

Client feedback

Sally herself shared this after we wrapped up the first phase:

"After being recommended Mark by three well trusted members of the elearning community as the best next move to continue the journey of The Portal, I had to get in touch. I was not disappointed. Mark brought years of experience and expertise to deliver an incredibly rich and detailed project including the RfP that we used to source the brilliant DabApps. Mark was never without the support, ideas and insight I needed for The Portal and I look forward to working with him again."