Thank you to everyone who completed the September 2020 teacher survey!

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

Read on for a summary of the survey results and what we’re working on in response to your suggestions.

(Note: if you’re part of an organization on Outschool and are wondering why you didn’t get this survey in your inbox, don’t worry…I’m coming for you next! 😉)

The Good News

For many of you, Outschool has provided a platform and community to expand your teaching practice and connect with motivated students across the world. It’s great seeing comments like this…

Outschool has introduced me to learners from all over the world.  Not only have I been able to do what I love but I’ve met so many extraordinary learners that have also taught me.  For that I am extremely grateful!

We’re thrilled to see that the two things that get you most excited about teaching on Outschool are:

• The freedom to teach what, how and when you want
• Your learners are generally excited to be in class / passionate about the topic

Most of you said Outschool exceeded the expectations you had when you first signed up, in large part because you’ve been able to connect with more students than you anticipated.

I have been able to reach and make a difference for so many more kids than I expected.

I already had a following before Outschool, and I expected them to sign up for my classes. I was surprised that most of my students were complete strangers from all over the country. Outschool has helped me gain a broader audience for my lessons.

Opportunities for Improvement

As much as we like reading your positive comments, we also appreciate those of you who shared your critiques and disappointments with us, so we’re equally grateful for comments like this…

When I started here, it was a VERY different company…At the beginning of this journey, Outschool felt like a community that respected its teachers and students. Now it feels like any other corporation that is mainly concerned about the bottom line and also like it is attempting to run a public school with an administration.

That’s a sentiment that we are monitoring closely as we grow. We’ll continue to look for ways to open up lines of communication and interaction between and among teachers and the Outschool team.

Additionally, many of you are frustrated with support:

The support staff have no idea about Outschool terms and policies and they work there. They send me back hundreds of incorrect emails until they finally get around to saying I was right.

We hear you. When enrollments picked up in March, we onboarded over 30 new agents very quickly to keep up with demand, and many of these agents still have a lot to learn about Outschool. The good news is that we’re making investments in training, coaching and documentation, and the support team is getting better every day; our typical reply times are now under an hour and average customer satisfaction scores have improved significantly.  If you have feedback on a particular support ticket or ideas on how we can do better, please take a minute to provide a review on your support conversation. We read each one and make changes based on your feedback.

In terms of the features you use every day, we clearly still have a lot of room for improvement. We appreciate you sharing your ideas and criticism. Here are some of your top requests for Outschool:

• Streamline learner and parent messaging
• New ways to engage with your existing audience
• Make improvements to the classroom experience
• More visibility into how your classes are performing
• Educating families on how to use Outschool

Many of these are in the works already and we will be incorporating some of your specific ideas. We’ve also been staffing up our product and engineering teams (the “tech folks”) so we can move faster on your feature ideas and requests. 💪 As a result, we’ll have dedicated teams focusing on key areas of improvement, such as the classroom experience. We’ll keep you up to date on the Product Updates Page.

Staying Involved…

I’ve called out just a handful of highlights from the survey. To learn more about your fellow teachers’ feedback, feel free to join this conversation in the Outschool Teacher Hub.

Have more to say? Send us your suggestions and feedback here.

Finally, thousands of you volunteered to provide even more input on specific features as we build them out, so some of you might see an invite from me in the coming months for a 1:1 call. It’s so helpful to get your input during our design process, and I’m grateful to have such a generous, invested teacher community to partner with. 🙏

Take care, and don’t forget to watch for the next survey in about 3 months! ✏️

-Megan, User Research Lead