About this guide

This is a living document. A dynamic, evolving snapshot of how we as OpenClassrooms talk to our learners and the public through our content.

As our product develops, the guide will develop alongside it. Because of this, it is important that we make changes to it in an atomic fashion maintaining a record of the accompanying narrative explaining the purpose, motivation and rational for those changes. To support this way of working, we store the guide in a GitHub repository allowing anyone at OpenClassrooms to access the commit history and see our evolving world.

The intention is for the following guidance to be applied to our product, our content and our marketing. While we respect and value the voice of our educators and the distinct style with which each communicate their knowledge, it is important that some principles remain consistent. For instance, we would prefer our educators to refer to learners as learners and present dates in the consistent pattern defined here. It is our language, but their accent.

Our world

When introducing new concepts, functions or ideas into the product, our preference should be to toe a line between being familiar to our learners and their understanding of education, and being unique as OpenClassrooms. We can ensure this by being consistent in our messaging throughout the experience.

You can Register on OpenClassrooms, after which you Sign in to begin a session.

Paths have many Courses and Projects, some of which are made with/by Partners.

Courses have many Parts.

Parts have many Chapters. Each tends to have at least one Assessment, which might be a MCQ Test, or a more practical Exercise. These prepare learners undertaking Paths to complete larger-scale Projects.

You start courses by Following courses. You can stop following and then follow if you wish. You can see your Progress on your Dashboard/Progress Dashboard. Courses can result in certificates of completion.

You can sign up to Premium subscriptions.

Certifying Courses have an Exercise in each Part. Completing these with a final score greater than 70% results in a Certificate of Achievement.

Completing Projects results in Project certificates.

Chapters have Videos and Texts.

An eBook Catalog has many eBooks.

A Course is designed and led by a or many Educators

Premium Group subscribers have a Mentor guiding their group.

Premium Plus subscribers have a tutor who is dedicated to them alone.

People

Learners: We call the people studying our courses Learners rather than using terms like students.
Educators: Our courses are designed and led by academics or professionals with appropriate expertise and experience in the topic. An Educator might be a Professor or hold other academic rank which adds to their authority, but to us they are an Educator.
Authors: Authors design, write and produce Course content, but are otherwise anonymous. Instead, we favour talking about Educators as being the “face” of the course; a learner should not be confronted with the confusing combination of both terms, and as such, we don’t use the term Author in learner-facing text.
Mentors: Mentors work with groups of learners with Premium Class.
Tutors: Tutors may also be Mentors, but are acting in a private, 1-2-1 context with a Premium Plus subscriber.

Talking about our Courses

Course information pages

The first exposure to our courses learners will likely encounter will be a Course Information page. The main purpose of this information should be to allow the learner to make more informed decisions about learning. When done well, this should also serve the business desirable-goal of encouraging more learners to sign up to courses (and hopefully premium services).

When writing descriptive copy, we should aim–in few and compelling words–to articulate answers to these questions:

What is the need/headache this course meets?
What is the context of the course or subject - why is it important?
How does this fit in a broader learning journey? (and perhaps path)

For example:

JavaScript is the most common entry point into the world of front-end web development. Whenever you see terms like Angular, Node, jQuery or React, you are seeing technologies building on the same basic language.

This course will introduce fundamental concepts in programming like functions, objects, variables and conditionals that you’ll need to succeed in learning any programming language, and introduce ideas that will start you on the path of developing dynamic, powerful web applications. It’s a great stepping stone into our Front-end Developer Path, or a refresher for people about to jump into studying other programming languages.

If you have never tried programming before or been put off learning by steep learning curves and long setup time, JavaScript is a fantastic way to get going quickly without even leaving your web browser.

Learning Outcomes

Courses (and Paths) can be more formally described through Learning Outcomes. These articulate what a learner will be able to do through completion of the course. In addition to offering a very succinct view of the learning, they also help define equivalence between our courses and those from other providers. For instance, a learner may use these to apply for exception from part of a module in a taught programme.

By the end of this course you’ll be able to:

Describe and interpret simple Javascript programs.
Use and manipulate variables.
Solve simple problems using functions, conditionals and looping.

The verb-first outcome is fairly standard across HE as a descriptor for learning outcomes. The only real catch is trying to avoid describing learning with verbs like “understand”, or “learn”; as outcomes, these are problematic as it is unclear what the learner is supposed to be able to do with their ‘understanding’ - do we expect them to be able to explain the concept? To apply the process? Or reflect on it? Picking one of these more purposeful verbs can often result in a better defined view of what the course is offering.

How will I learn?

While this might seem obvious on MOOCs (e.g. watching videos and submitting assignments), it would be helpful to clarify it in each course. For instance, do I need to write code? Or is this purely theoretical? Will we work with real-life business case-studies? Or will it hold my hand through starting my own company?

What do I need to succeed?

We should identify any prerequisites (specifically in knowledge) and help learners understand whether they meet them, and wherever possible, show people how they might re-mediate these gaps. For instance, we might suggest an introductory programming course for learners wishing to study a more advanced or specific one.

Technical requirements are important, but we only need to make something of them when they go beyond what learners need to access the course. For instance, if they will need to install a tool-chain like Android Studio, we should tell them upfront - and reassure them that there will be guidance in the course.

Where next?

With OC’s priorities, we should be highlighting courses both as entry points into careers, and Paths in as flexible a way as possible; unless there is a specific sequencing requirement, is there a potential logical pathway from each entry point (e.g. “once you’ve learnt the basics…”; “next, revisit the basics…”)