1. Course maintenance
After all the weeks of hard work you just put into your course, now it's launched and live on the DataCamp platform. You might think that means you're done, and will never have to think about your course again. This is not true! Once a course is hard launched, it enters what we call "maintenance mode". Let's learn more about what that means.
2. Improve course performance using data from learners
DataCamp collects a lot of data on how every exercise performs. This lets you easily discover what learners like or don't like about a course, and what they find too easy or too hard.
3. Why maintain your course?
Courses with higher ratings typically have higher completion rates. That means that better courses make more money. Even a small amount of maintenance can pay dividends, so it's in your best interest to dedicate time to maintaining your course.
4. Content Dashboard
Once your course is live, you'll be given access to the Content Dashboard that collects all learner feedback into one place. The metrics center around three ideas: the popularity of the exercise, the difficulty level, and learner satisfaction.
5. Popularity metrics
The popularity metrics include the number of learners starting and completing your course and the completion rate, which is the ratio of these two.
A good completion rate is at least 25%.
The number of learners completing the course is likely to be the most interesting to you since that determines how you get paid. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you how to improve your course, so let's take a look at some other metrics.
6. Difficulty metrics
Once a learner asks for a solution to an exercise, they aren't learning as much. We want learners to learn the concepts we teach, which means that we prefer the percentage of learners who ask for a solution to be less than 20 for most or all exercises in a course.
The percentage of learners who ask for the hint is also shown on the dashboard; this value should be below 35 for most exercises.
7. Satisfaction metrics
learners can rate chapters from one to five stars. If the exercises are clear and contain no mistakes or technical problems, most learners will give the chapter a four or five-star rating.
A rating of 4.3 for the entire course is considered good, and a rating of 4.7 is considered excellent. You should aim to have a course above the 4.3 rating limit.
8. Feedback
As well as ratings, learners can provide feedback on exercises. Be warned: the majority of the feedback contains criticism, and some of it isn't very nice.
That said, the feedback also contains lots of useful information about what went wrong, so it is a very powerful tool for quickly finding things to improve.
9. Maintenance process: getting started
Although the process of performing maintenance can seem nebulous and overwhelming, there's an easy process to follow to get started.
First, set aside a few hours every month to log into the Content Dashboard and check in on your course. Review the number of completions, the rating, and any exercises with a high "asked hint" or "asked solution" percentages as well as any exercises with a high number of feedback messages.
You can then refer to our collection of Instructor Success support articles on how to get started, expected metrics, how to examine the issues learners may be reporting, and how to fix common problems.
10. Maintenance process: submit for review
Once you have reviewed the exercises, head over to the Teach editor. Create a new branch, and make your edits. To keep things neat and organized, make all edits for each round of maintenance on one branch. Open new branches as needed for ongoing maintenance.
Then go to your course's Github repository and create a pull request of the branch you just made. Assign '@datacamp-contentquality' as a reviewer. If the team has any questions, they'll be in touch. If not, they will go ahead and merge the maintenance branch with master and the changes will go live. All done!
11. I fix, you fix
Lastly, remember that with the exception of the submission correctness tests, the end responsibility lies with you to maintain your course. Remember, this is your intellectual property, and these are your learners.
12. Let's practice!
Now you've seen what the dashboard can do, let's try some exercises!