Codecademy - March 23
- Marco Morales
Overview
The Codecademy mobile experience reviewed is an example of a learning experience simplified down to clear skill areas, with daily engagement around review and practice content as the primary goal. Simplified navigation, reduced content depth compared to Open edX, removal of assignment deadlines etc all represent simplicity that may not work for most Open edX courses, but you can see the benefits of this in their experience usability and visual progress clarity.
The Codecademy experience elevates daily activity and content engagement over a pure course listing + dashboard approach to their home experience, an experience better fit to quickly getting students into a content flow on the go compared to the current Open edX mobile experience.
Experience Areas of Note
For Codecademy, we conducted a simplified app review compared to the deep dives done for Coursera - March 23 , Duolingo - Feb23 .
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Course Home / Today Experience The Course home experience is focused on getting students to address specific review + practice content from their course listing, as opposed to being a course listing dashboard view. Upsell messages and notifications, streak counts, and other content articles of relevance are linked from this view.
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Simplified Course Navigation Codecademy’s course navigation is much simpler than the Open edX mobile default experience (with so many levels of depth + hierarchy presented.) Numerical elements order the course and the visual focus is on the course title + start action. The app’s learning progress is focused on queueing up lessons “for today” so you can add the course to your list of today’s activity, helping orient a student around making daily progress.
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Content Experience - Progress and Motivation Full width, easily selected problem types with a simplified progress visualization typifies the content experience, minimizing excessive labeling / titles and structure to focus on content submission and review. Emoji act as fleeting positive motivating notifications as your progress through problems. |    |
Content Progression - Reading Activity / Content cards can be sequenced for content review and learning (as well as accessed later for review), a simplified representation of the skills and concepts covered in each class that is more easily processed as the learner-oriented chunk of learning content covered. By contrast Open edX mobile gives educators full creative flexibility on content layout and sequencing without needing to codify content into skill cards / blocks for later recall. This means the Codecademy experience represents an experience far more streamlined / simplified than what Open edX mobile can emulate, but it is still a helpful contrasting experience to show the value of the simplicity and clarity of their navigation and content flow. |   |
External Community The core application does not have a native discussions experience and encourages students to connect on external communities (Ex: Facebook) | 
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Blocked Commerce / Subscription While commerce operations aren’t possible within the experience, there is visibility into a broader catalog offering presented in the mobile app experience. |  |
Calendar Focused Profile and Activity As noted before, the clear planning + daily activity oriented focused of the experience is echoed also in the profile view. A simplified calendar and streak quantification makes up the bulk of the profile. |  |
Simplified Catalog Browse Clear categories and skill focused courses are presented in the experience, all generally in the same level / scope as introductory content (for the free catalog!) |  |