Ishant Juyal’s approach
The north star metric for Courser's online skill development courses should be the "Course completion rate".
Why? Because as an online skill development course, the real value the user is trying to reach is to learn that skill and then use it to either get a job or achieve a target. The right metric for Coursera to track if the user really learnt the skill all the way is to see if they completed the course or not. And if they can't, then to encourage them to complete it.
Other important metrics but these are not north star:
- Course Enrolment Rate (Exploration -> Enrolment)
- Average time taken to complete a course (Start -> Course Completion)
- Number of users who enrolled in course
- Average rating of the course by completed users
Trade offs: Over optimizing for Course Completion Rate can lead to the instructor simplifying the course so that the users complete it faster, even though they might not be gaining the skill. That needs to be also tracked, like the quality of the course and the learnings the users are getting.