Cookie Jar

Cookie Jar - Universal Reward System for Online Learning

Mastering Design Thinking, MIT Sloan School of Management - Group project

The opportunity

Online learning has gained significance due to COVID, but it is not a replacement for the real-world classroom experience for young learners. Keeping young students motivated and engaged in online learning is a major challenge for parents and teachers alike.
Better engagement = interaction with peers and interactive coursework.
There is a need for an incentive based system which offers rewards and positive reinforcement for learning. Online content creators, content delivery platforms, content teachers and parents can use this system to engage their young learners better.

Mission statement

Online learning platforms have gained popularity amongst students and parents due to flexibility in learning and recently reduced classroom access due to COVID-19. We are investigating ways to engage users online while addressing the existing shortcomings and improving the overall learning experience.

Design Process

Exploration phase

• 10 opportunity ideas submitted, 1 selected.
• A tie on the first round of voting led to the rediscussion of the project selection during which there were several new insights.
• Three projects were shortlisted based on those insights and a 2nd round of voting was conducted.
• One opportunity was then unanimously voted on to be pursued.

User interviews conducted with 15 parents and 4 teachers

• Identification of users primary, secondary and latent needs.
• Needs decomposition.
• Translation of needs into product specifications.

Personas

• Based upon our research, we created personas to represent our users.

Brainstorming solutions

During the brainstorming session we realized that the most innovative solution we had was the reward system and that we could integrate it into the concept of an online learning platform along with other soulutions to meet our customers needs. We came up with this final concept: an open rewards ecosystem that offers a catalytic support for individuals and groups to better engage, collaborate and interact toward learning goals in both virtual and physical settings. We named it Cookie Jar.

Competitive benchmarking

• It proved that there are no products/services on the market which are providing their users with a reward system and personalized service.

Service experience mapping

Sketch

Web page design

Recommendation

Based on our DFV analysis we concluded that this opportunity is definitely worth pursuing for the following reasons:
• A proven positive reinforcement based psychology forms the core of this idea.
• There is a real need in the market for such solution.
• A comprehensive reward based learning solution does not exist in the market.
• The customer base for this product is large and growing over the next few years.
• The solution can be developed, deployed and scaled.
• The opportunity can be extended to other use cases over time including corporate learning.
• Current planned pricing is competitive.
• We can achieve positive NPV and a robust rate of return using multiple cost and revenue scenarios.