FOSSA 101, Session 9

I keep referring to losing "a quarter of your learners" because of the five FOSSA problems. And the solutions or Experiments I'm suggesting are the work you'll do to bring the learners back - to make your Learning Thing work again, for the 25% of them. So it's fair that we talk about the numbers for a little while.

The question you are maybe asking yourself is, "Is it honestly that bad?"

Am I really going to lose one in four learners because of these five problems? And if this guy says so - where are his numbers?

Here's the math. I am writing this in 2024. Things may change in the future, but here is where we are.

First of all - just to keep things simple, I am saying that each of the five FOSSA problems makes 5% of your learners give up. So five times five gives me the 25% we're talking about.

In real life, things will never be this obvious. But I want this to be a story about your Learning Things and the people who use them - not just about the math behind the problems. So I keep things simple here.

Now, then - where are the numbers for each of the problems?

Free: how many learners cannot afford your Learning Thing?

In the UK, in 2022/2023, 18% of the people were in absolute poverty. (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07096/)

In the US, in 2022, the official poverty rate was 11.5%. (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-280.html)

Across the world, in 2022, 8.98% of people lived on less than $2.15 per day. (https://ourworldindata.org/poverty#key-insights).

Conclusion: I told you that you're likely to lose 5% of your learners because they can't afford your Learning Thing. The real number is likely to be much higher. You will be able to help your situation with good marketing and sales - but even if your Learning Thing goes to learners in countries such as the UK or the US, you will still have this problem.

Open: how many learners cannot make your Learning Thing run on their software?

In the US, in 2022, between 20 and 30% of all people said that they don't own a computer, or a smartphone, or home broadband. About half of them didn't have a tablet. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/19/some-digital-divides-persist-between-rural-urban-and-suburban-america/)

In the UK, in 2022, 10% of device users didn't go online at all. About 11% of them didn't know how to turn on their device. (https://digit-research.org/data_commentaries/measuring-digital-exclusion/)

Across all developed countries, in 2019, 13% of people didn't have internet access. (https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/03/what-is-the-digital-divide/)

Across the world, in 2024, 3.91% of windows users use a version that's no longer supported (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide). 13.44% of all Android users use an old version that hasn't been updated in at least 1.5 years (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android/mobile-tablet/worldwide)

Conclusion: it is very difficult to find definite numbers for this one. People use different machines to do different things. But even in the developed countries, there will be more than 5% of learners who will have problems with your Learning Thing. Often their machines aren't even old - they're just not the ones you thought of.

Small: how many learners cannot download your Learning Thing?

In the UK, in 2021, at least 18% of all households struggled to pay for the data plan for at least 1 device, and 5% of all households found it hard to afford broadband internet. (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/multi-sector/affordability-of-communications-services/2021/affordability-of-communications-services-summary.pdf)

Across the world, in 2021, 1GB of mobile data became less affordable than in the previous year (https://adi.a4ai.org/extra/baskets/A4AI/2021/mobile_broadband_pricing_gni.php).

The size of a typical page downloaded to your desktop device increased from 467 kilobytes in 2010 to 2643 kilobytes in 2024. (https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-the-web)

Conclusion: across the planet, we keep making bigger pages and keep making our broadband more expensive. 5% is a number that fits countries like the UK right now. It's worse in other countries, and it will be getting worse everywhere in years to come.

Simple: how many learners cannot understand your Learning Thing?

In the UK, in 2024, about 2.1% of adults have a learning disability (https://www.mencap.org.uk/learning-disability-explained/research-and-statistics/how-common-learning-disability).

In the US, in 2002, about 40% of people aged 65 or over had age-related memory impairment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123445).

Across the world, almost 95% of all English speakers weren't born in an English-speaking country (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02320-2).

Conclusion: most of the learners on Earth speak more than one language, and many of them will have problems with difficult words - English or not. Making your Learning Thing simple helps your older learners, and your learners with learning disabilities, and your multilingual learners, too. The number is far greater than 5%.

Accessible: how many learners with disabilities cannot access your Learning Thing?

Across the world, about 16% of people live with "significant disability" (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health)

This number probably does not include people with temporary disability (such as a 4 week recovery after eye surgery) or situational disability (for example, having to sit in a noisy room with a child climbing over you).

Across the world, over 95% of the most popular websites have an accessibility problem. (https://webaim.org/projects/million/#wcag)

Conclusion: in real life, the number of learners who can't access your Learning Thing is higher than 5%. And it's really hard to find a Learning Thing which got built with no accessibility problems.

Bad news, good news: making sense of the numbers

There are so many ways to look at all these numbers. So many learner stories I could tell.

I want to spend a moment on just two of these ways: I want to call them the Bad News Spiral and the Good News Spiral.

The first story is the Bad News Spiral. Maybe you had an idea about this already, when you were reading the numbers. In the Bad News Spiral, there is never just one problem for one learner.

Instead, one problem connects to another problem. For example - your computer breaks. So you have to budget for a new one. So you can't afford the data top-up for three months. So you fall behind on your video assignments. So you are stressed and find it hard to do the reading...

Or: you are recovering from chemotherapy, but you still log on to your online lectures. Your arms hurt when you try to type up the notes. The pain and the brain fog makes it hard to understand what the lecturers are saying. And the hospital wi-fi keeps cutting out...

You can probably come up with more of these Bad News Spirals, just by looking at the numbers I shared with you.

The Good News Spiral is the opposite of this. We already saw how FOSSA Experiments work on one problem at a time. We also saw that a FOSSA Experiments can connect with each other.

This is when you begin to build your FOSSA Experiments to help learners with more than just one problem.

For example - you decide to make a Free package of your Learning Thing. You discover that the best way to do it is to save articles as plain text. You go on to save images and audio files in two more Open formats. Then you look at how Small the package is - what a nice surprise!

Or: you try to rework your Learning Thing to make it more Accessible. You work with an editor who writes alternative text for your images. You read her work, and really like her style of writing. She has two more weeks of availability - so she uses this time to work through the text on the web pages, too. As a result, the text is more Simple. She asks you about the file formats to send back all her work - you use this as a chance to ask for Open file formats.

It's likely that problems with your Learning Thing will be important to more than 25% of your learners. But it's also likely that when you start working on them - when you try a FOSSA Experiment or two - you will start helping more learners, all at once.

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