Thank you to everyone who participated in our March 2021 educator survey!

As promised, we read each and every survey response (almost 2000 of them)! And as always, we learned so much.

⭐️ Some Interesting Things We Learned

• ~35% of OS educators are OS parents, too!
• ~54% of OS educators give assignments to learners to complete outside of live class meetings; most commonly, educators give assignments to help learners extend their learning or go deeper with the material
• ~43% of OS educators are state-certified teachers

💯 What We’re Doing Well

We heard that Outschool continues to be a great source of both primary and supplementary income for many educators.

Over 80% shared that the freedom to teach what, how, and when you want it continues to be a top reason for why you’re excited about teaching on Outschool. 🎉

Here are some comments that gave us all the warm fuzzies:

• “I am amazed, delighted, blessed, and inspired by this platform. Outschool has changed my life, and my family’s in a huge way.”
• “I love having this opportunity and I love my learners.”
• “I love the Outschool platform. It has been life-changing for me during the pandemic to be able to teach what I love, get creative with designing courses to meet my students needs and connecting with children from all over the world. It really has given my life purpose and I am so grateful. Thank you Outschool!”

💪🏽 Areas of Improvement

We also know that there are some things that we can do better. Many of you shared ideas for how we can make things easier for you on Outschool.

On the whole, getting enrollments is a top pain point for our educator community. We also analyzed responses from our high-volume educators; the lack of features to build and sustain an audience of loyal families was the top pain point for this group. Our team reviewed feedback from all groups of educators to better understand the key takeaways and themes. Here are the areas that you noted as the ones where you’d like to see the most improvement on our part ranked by order of frequency:

• Scheduling tools
• Communication with learners and families
• Classroom functionality
• Reviews and ratings
• Class approvals

Here are some comments about scheduling, for example:

• “I get confused when trying to meet everyone’s needs while scheduling. I get the email but it doesn’t always lead me to the full thread of the conversation, and I can’t easily see all the requests on the same page.”
• “I would love to be able to create sections straight from the calendar view under schedule”
• “It would be so much easier to have an actual calendar view with time slots so I can just click Tuesday, Wed, Thursday at 9:00 am. Then the same for 10:00 etc. Instead of going through the process every single time. It just takes so long”

Communication with learners and families is another major area of improvement surfaced through open-ended comments in this survey. We heard from you on how communication is housed in too many places, often leading to a fragmented experience for you and the families you serve.

Here are some comments about communication with learners and families:

• “It’s still so hard to find messages. After I get an email about a message from a parent, I have to go to Outschool and remember which class it was referring to so I can find it. And I can’t always go to Outschool right away so I often forget about the messages or class requests. We should just have one inbox that would indicate if we haven’t responded yet.”
• “It’s confusing to have multiple places to communicate with parents. It would be nice to have one page of communication.”

We’re grateful for your candid feedback as these types of insights help our team better understand how we can make a better experience for everyone in the Outschool community.

So, what’s next?

These insights are helping our teams make informed decisions about what features to prioritize, and how to remove any obstacles preventing educators from working more effectively with Outschool.

• We just made it easier for you to schedule sections on your calendar
• This week, we’re adding @-mentions to help you have better classroom conversations with learners

We’ll continue to make changes and progress based on your feedback. Stay tuned for more updates related to product changes and marketplace insights in our upcoming emails.