The term “cohort learning” or “cohort-based” learning refers to the focus on the students in the classroom. It shifts the attention from the instructor/the creator to the group of students. It focuses on learning with community. At MỞ, we believe in learning with community and we are on our journey to design a 100-student cohort in the next year.
Learning with community is nothing new. It has always been our natural way of learning. Especially in the Vietnam, it ties directly with our collective culture. Thus, cohort learning has always been around.
However, in the context of online education and situated in the increasing advancement of technology and the Internet, learning with community has many untapped potentials. Online cohort learning allows people regardless of geographical distances to come together to learn a topic that they are interested in. This new form of learning on the Internet allows for communities to emerge from individuals’ intellectual loneliness.
In order to understand the rise of cohort learning, let’s look at how the landscape of online learning has been transforming.
Focus: How do we share content online?
When: Around 2008
Leading players: high-reputation universities
Type of courses: Self-paced
In this phase, we see the rise of platforms such as EdX (pioneered by Harvard and MIT), Coursera, Udacity (pioneered by Stanford). The cost of universities in the US was increasing every year and MOOCs allow for content taught in high-end universities to be shared online. The Internet was used as a space to decentralize access to education.
Problems that arose: The completion rate of MOOCs is very low. Access to and high completion rates of courses on these platforms remain in very highly educated groups in society.
Lesson learned here: Simply making educational content open and free online doesn’t mean people will learn it.
Focus: How do we make money online?
When: Around 2010
Leading players: Skillshare, Udemy
Type of courses: Self-paced
The industry was dominated by large universities who had lots of funding to be able to make courses free and open to access. In other words, the industry was limited by a lack of commercialization. The private sectors wanted to get their parts in the pie of education. Rather than having courses published only by large, high-reputation universities, now anyone has the ability to publish a course. It gave the power of teaching, and sharing content to more people instead of just an elite, scholarly group in society.
The Internet became a space that allows people to not only receive an education but also to produce, and create one. The Internet gradually provided people access to individual person’s brains, similar to David Perell’s People-Driven Learning concept.
Problems that arose: Since the power lies in the hands of these platforms, instructors feel like they are being taken advantage of (i.e., with Udemy’s deep discounts, and ads). The instructors have to compromise many things as they are dependent on these huge platforms. These platforms also have a vast amount of courses instead of a few focus topics. Thus, there is a barrier to discovery and the chance of discovery is under the influence of algorithms on these platforms.
<aside> 💡 The focus of this phase is how we make money online. However, platforms are taking advantage of individuals who want to monetize content online. The “we” here focus on big platforms. Thus, came the third phase. The toolkit!
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Lesson learned here: Ownership in teaching is important for the instructors to go a long way. They want to have control over their courses, marketing, pricing, and revenues, and have direct interaction with the students.
SkillShare’s main page
Udemy’s main page
Thinkific’s main page
Kajabi’s main page
Focus: How to own your audience?
When: Around 2014
Leading players: Teach:able, Thinkific, Kajabi
Type of courses: Self-paced
Comparing the information on the main page of SkillShare and Udemy vs. Thinkific and Kajabi, we saw clearly a shift from content to creators/instructors. This phase saw the rise of platforms that treated creators and instructors as their customers instead of simply as suppliers. They understand the pain of the creators from the existing phase and they build an end-to-end infrastructure to help creators own their audience and get a fairer share of a course’s revenues. This infrastructure involves everything from webpage design, copywriting, marketing, to course building.
Problems that arose: Soon, the instructors felt like there were so many things they need to learn and handle to build a course. They didn’t have any time left to focus on the course itself. The problem with self-paced courses’ completion rate remained.
Lessons learned: In all of the above phases, we have been focusing on the supply side of content and we haven’t done much about the completion rate problems of self-paced courses. We have basically overlooked the students’ problems: how to learn effectively, how to produce outputs, etc. One thing I learn from making this analysis is no matter how experienced the instructor is, just absorbing the content itself is not learning. Learning involves diving deep into the content, making analyses, and having discussions and a learner cannot achieve all of those steps by themselves.
Okay, sounds like we have more than one stakeholder to fit into a learning model.
Main questions: How do we give instructors just the right amount of support so that they have enough ownership over their course that they feel motivated to teach? How do we provide students a supportive and engaging space to learn and finish the instructors’ content?
The promise of cohort-based learning is that students will learn with a group. The completion rate, as well as assessment of students’ learning, will be guaranteed with the following elements (will write details soon):
For instructors, they will get revenue shares based on how much they want to involve in the end-to-end course marketing and course-building process. From the above phases, we learn that:
Some of the questions that I am wondering about cohort-based learning:
MỞ is currently following the cohort-based learning methodology. Excited to learn more about this space.
This piece is a rewrite of my understanding of Tiago Forte’s blog post.
Cohort-based courses that I am following
I saw that Teachable and Kajabi are also writing blog posts about the importance of cohort-based courses. I wonder how these two platforms will transition as they recognize the importance of serving students as your customers not just the instructors/creators.