Dear Fearose,
Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you are facing issues. Let me address a few issues right away:
Scholaranium: You mentioned that you purchased Verbal Online in October 2014, while Scholaranium was launched on Jan 31 2015. We offered Scholaranium as a free upgrade to our existing customers. Prior to as well as after launch, we did send three emails asking our customers to request access to Scholaranium. Had you requested access then, you would have received instructions + a list of help videos on how to use Scholaranium. Also, had you purchased after Jan 31, you would have received access automatically.
Internal Forums + How to navigate the site: You get help videos on how to navigate the site - with your purchase receipt. These help videos illustrate pretty much everything. In addition, we have dedicated support teams who support you even on weekends. Had you written to support (at) e(dash)gmat.com, you would have received a response by now.
I completely agree that the site design is different from many other educational sites - you mentioned Manhattan; I would say even Veritas.. and there are good reasons for that. Here are a few below:
Organization of Content
Manhattan and VeritasIf you look at their online courses - they require you to read their books for foundational and core conceptual learnings, do the online lessons (which we call eLearning) for revision, and attend the Live Sessions after that. And then if you want to post a doubt - you go to their forums and post the same. A majority of their online portal is designed around Live Sessions. (their portals are organized by dates for live sessions) Why is that? My guess is that majority of their students purchase their Live Courses rather than self paced learning courses (my guess is based on the fact that On demand courses comprise of fewer than 10% of overall reviews for both companies).
e-GMATAt
e-GMAT, 65% of our students just purchase "On demand" courses and are very happy with them. Secondly, the foundation, conceptual, and application based learning all take place within our courses (no more reading books). For example the Sentence Correction course contains everything that you need to ace GMAT SC (including a very healthy dose of practice questions). Also, the number of hours of eLearning that our Sentence Correction course provides is probably 5-7 times that Veritas or Manhattan provide.
Secondly, we are of the firm belief that when you are learning one topic, you focus all your attention on that topic. The incredible success of our students proves that such is the case. Hence, the organization of our courses is by subject matter (separate SC, CR, RC courses) rather than by classes.
Lastly, we have a dedicated forum for every concept. Why - because if you have a doubt while learning a concept, we do not want you to search in a random forum whether this doubt has been responded to. You just need to go to the dedicated forum and look for it. Most of our students tell us that because of this forum architecture, 90% of their doubts are addressed right away just by looking at the responses to older posts. Now the forum button is not in your face, but its right next to the launch button. Again, had you emailed a subject matter query to any of our email addresses, our support team would have sent you a help video as to how to post your doubt.
Now since you are an IT guy, you probably understand that implementing 100+ internal forums, building tracking mechanisms to ensure that each of the doubts posted in these forums reach the SMEs and ensuring that the SMEs respond within the SLA is much more complex than simply implementing a forum and asking everyone to post there. However, we chose to do the same since this keeps things organized and easier for our students in the long run.
The organization of our courses is different because a lot of our decisions are governed by Learning Pedagogy we follow (after all that has a much bigger impact your end GMAT score than the User Interface) and the enhancement processes we have within the company. For example - you may find that our videos take a bit longer to load than the videos from Manhattan or Veritas. Why is that - its because we track every single click within the video and every single exercise question that you solve within the video.
We use this date to enhance the the overall offering; for example, if we find that if a majority of students are revising a slide multiple times, or if a majority is getting a particular post assessment question wrong then we either enhance the concept or add additional content. Our in depth series in As Vs. Like is an example of such an exercise. We do this even though this adds 500K records to our database every day. I don't believe many test prep companies engage in such an exercise.
Can the user interface be made more friendly - yes it can be, and we will work on the same in a few months.
Quote:
Moreover to manage traffic you have done one very sad thing in your site.ie if I am reading something for say 15 minute and then click next question ,It asks to log in again
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I do agree that we have a timeout mechanism built in. We log you out if you are not using the system for 25 minutes. This in principle is the right thing to do since if you are disengaged from learning for long time, then you should log in again and restart your learning. But its not done to manage traffic. Our CTO did security for a bank as well as for a trading floor and this is one thing that I cannot get him to change. This (his security background) is the reason why almost everything on
e-GMAT is https where as many test prep organizations (including GMAT Club and Veritas Prep) work on pure http.
Bottom line - our courses are structured differently than anything out there because of conscious decisions that are based either on learning pedagogy or on security. While these decisions may lead to a slight learning curve while using the site, the benefits outweigh the inconvenience. In addition, we provide excellent support (90%+ questions are answered within 24 hours) so do write to us is you have any questions/concerns.
Lastly, I would be very happy to take any feedback that you to improve the user experience. Write to me and I would be happy to set up a call.
Regards,
Rajat Sadana
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31 Jul 2014, 17:44
