FOSSA 101, Session 3

You're probably asking yourself, "Wait - am I really losing one in four learners because of these five problems?" There is no easy way to answer this, because Learning Things come in all shapes and sizes, reaching learners all across the planet.

But let's say that, on average, each of these problems is important to 5% of your learners. So for five of them, your Learning Thing is too expensive - for the next five, it won't run on their device... and so on. Add these together, and the math checks out - 25% of your learners are gone.

Sometimes things will get better, and sometimes worse. Let's say you managed to keep the cost down, and you also fixed the accessibility problems. Fantastic! But then you launch your Learning Thing in a new country, where the internet is much slower than in your previous markets. So the five folks who couldn't download your Learning Thing now become fifteen.

Each of the problems FOSSA Learning cares about can become more or less important from one learner story to the next. But here's what I like about FOSSA: it tries to work on all five of them - just in case your learners find themselves in a place where one of these five problems becomes, well... a problem.

And by working the FOSSA way, you are also preparing yourself to tackle another problem. You are preparing your learners - and your Learning Things - for a changing, uncertain world.

What if it got worse?

The network of museums and NGOs in your country loses funding for the next three years. They can no longer afford the subscription fees for your Learning Thing. But there are hundreds of learners still on their projects - and they'll be there for at least a year. Now what?

After launching your New Learning Thing, you get a handful of support tickets. They are about a third-party video player which stopped working. You're still looking into this, when the next day, the handful of tickets becomes a deluge. The player app got deleted from an App Store - and now the videos in your Learning Thing are useless. Now what?

It's winter, and the country's power grid is getting targeted by bombers and missiles. That means power outages. And sometimes, that means no internet. Your Learning Thing needs an over-the-air update before the exams. Your sales reps in the country email you, saying, "We tried all night to get this on our tablets. And we're the lucky ones to have internet at all." Now what?

There were seven new chapters added to your Learning Thing, and all went well, until you saw the data and feedback from your teachers on the ground. All the learners in your international schools did well on the old material, but nearly failed the new material. You decide to check for yourself, and open up a lesson. Three paragraphs later, you realise that you - a grown Milwaukee man with an engineering degree - can't understand most of what you're reading in the high school physics book you're selling. Now what?

The website for your Learning Thing gets a re-design, and this time - after your in-house developers moved on - you paid someone to design it for you. It works faster than the previous one, and looks sleek. One day after the launch, you're on an urgent call with your old developer team. The new website no longer works with screen readers, which upset several long-standing blind customers ("It always used to work, and now it's as if a hurricane's been through it...!") and the company you hired doesn't know how to fix this. Now what?

Your Learning Thing never works in a bubble. It works with real people, in a changing world, and connects to lots of other Things on people's computers, tablets, in their everyday lives.

Something that used to work last week, now stops working. You know this: we all nearly lose our marbles every time our computer or our favourite website updates and moves things around!

Small problems become big problems. People who had no problem with your Learning Thing change devices, or budgets, and have a problem now.

Wouldn't it be better to have a backup plan in mind? It would. That's what FOSSA tries to be.

Let's now take a closer look at each of these problems in turn. And here's a promise: each of them will come with an experiment that will help you start looking for solutions.

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