The Future of Studying with Asana
Category: Education
Purpose: Improving student productivity with a new experience of studying
Background
A little less than 500,000 college students graduate every year. Spending on average 4 years to graduate, students have to balance so much and stress out while doing it. Social life, organizations, fraternities, sports and of course academics — just some of the many aspects that many get overwhelmed with.
Colleges and universities academics are built on their professor and student relationship, a relationship which is often fostered through Learning Management Systems (LMS). Individuals are able to deliver, organize and centralize the programs and courses offered.
Such softwares are used by colleges in development, delivering and progress tracking of academics for courses offered at the institutions. Since the pandemic, online schooling has only increased by 15.4% with 73.8 million users of LMS’s and such softwares are crucial to the success in understanding expectations between professor to student relationships. Although there is much to be done to improve this relationship, I’d like to focus on how students can be successful in the meantime.
Problems with Current LMS’s
For an average 16 unit course load for a full time student, we are expected to work 48 hours a week — a number that is exceeded in most cases. Common LMS’s such as Canvas and Blackboard are used on the daily by millions of students in efforts to stay up to date on assignments and upcoming lectures. However, students aren’t able to successfully keep track of their tasks. These LMS’s often create user experiences that benefit professors more than students resulting in a platform forced for students to use but not designed for them.
As a result, students end up using third party apps such as Todoist, Notion and Google Tasks. There is no integration that currently exists into platforms with LMS’s and that is where Asana can come in. Although Asana prioritizes team productivity, I believe their current platform can empower students to improve their productivity with an integration into LMS’s for courses.
Why Asana
Asana has 3000+ app integrations with tools such as Google Suite, Github and Microsoft OneDrive. Additional integrations with these LMS’s would be easier for Asana to create then it’s competitors because of its familiarity in the space and ability to efficiently create.
Asana is built on File Sharing and Communication, two aspects of academics that are used on the day to day for assignments and projects. Being able to link Google Suite and Microsoft Office, both widely used softwares by colleges, would eliminate yet another hassle that a student goes through. Asana’s current integrations allow them to create a workflow for a student reliably and scale quickly.
The company’s revenue model is based on subscription tiers ranging from a free basic plan to an enterprise plan for large organizations. Described further in the GTM, an approach to colleges and student accounts could significantly improve revenues in the long term.
User Flow
I spent a couple weeks working on an independent student studying platform and was able to develop a simple but core workflow for users.
General user flow would include the pages listed above, giving priority to pages that student users need on a day to day basis in a seamless manner. Currently, having to switch between tabs and applications creates a difficult experience for students but being able to consolidate them all into 1 platform provides the unique value proposition that Asana needs to channel these new users into their platform.
When a student logs into Asana, they should be able to integrate their LMS and accounts. Each course will be able to have its own project on Asana which can be described through notes. Imagine the ticket system on Jira but simplified.
Additional features could include an analysis/report on productivity and being able to suggest tips and techniques that could be helpful to a student to increase their efficiency.
Submissions through asana into LMS, group management and team projects becomes much easier through this ecosystem created.
Go-To-Market Strategy & Metrics
Asana describes that “all customers were either channeled through a free trial (from the premium plans) or from the Basic, free service.” A similar approach can be taken when approaching colleges and undergraduate students. Given Asana’s success with these initial trials, the learning curve for the platform must be low or described thoroughly for such a high conversion rate. Asana can provide student tiered accounts as well as selling to colleges for sponsored accounts for students. The LMS market size “will grow from 13.4 billion USD in 2020 to 25.7 billion by 2025.”
The lifetime value of users is something that should be considered by Asana in this endevour given that if students are able to see success with the platform, they are likely to recommend it to future teams and improving long term revenue. In addition, revenue from college paid accounts would provide for a consistent revenue. Overall, this strategy would provide for new customers from both colleges and students — user bases that can ultimately help brand presence and awareness.
Resources
“LMS Market.” Market Research Firm, MarketsandMarkets, June 2020, www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/learning-management-systems-market-1266.html.
McGraw, Noah. The State of Online Education in 2020, Online Schools Report, 29 July 2020, www.onlineschoolsreport.com/the-state-of-online-education/.
“Work on Big Ideas, without the Busywork.” Asana, asana.com/.
I’m a rising senior at UC Davis studying Managerial Economics, Computer Science, and Technology Management. I would love to hear any feedback or critique you may have!
Given my intentions to explore different design tools in product design and user research, this project was created with Figma. Shoutout to Yuji Chan and Rina Takikawa for helping with the project!
