Three Design Lessons from Cohort Based Courses

What CBCs tell us about how to design for ~85% completion & ~90% impact rates

Cohort-Based Courses - also know as CBCs - are increasingly hailed as a victory for online learning.

These small-group online courses, in which instructors and students work together to solve problems, typically achieve completion rates that MOOCs and platforms like Udemy, Teachable and Skillshare could only dream of:

• The Times Higher Education reported that Esme Learning’s cohort-based courses deliver 98-100% completion & satisfaction.

• Seth Godin’s AltMBA famously sells itself on its 96% completion rate.

• Nomadic Learning’s cohort-based programs are reported to deliver 90+% completion rates.

• At Section 4, completion rates were above 70% in March 2021 and 88% of students reported that they had applied what they’d learned within three months of completing the course.

• The Training Journal reports an overall completion rate for Cohort Based Courses of ~85%.

So, what’s driving this success and what can we learn about how CBCs are designed to improve learner motivation, completion & impact for all online courses?

Spoiler: the Answer Isn’t Zoom

Often it’s assumed that cohort based courses are successful because they take us back to a tried and tested method of learning: real-time interaction among peers, under the responsive guidance of an instructor.

The rise to prominence of CBCs is often seen as happening in parallel with the popularisation of video-conferencing tech like Zoom & Butter which make large group live classes more frictionless & reliable than ever.

While sync time can be a critical part of the CBC experience, it’s not fundamentally the reason that CBCs are effective.

My research & experience as a designer & instructor of CBCs shows that there are three design approaches which explain the success of CBCs and can be applied to the design of any online course.

Design Differentiator #1: Community

Cohort-based learning makes the learning experience collaborative & connected. 

If you look at how human beings learn, it’s almost always in a community: 

• A novice learns by watching a master demonstrate the nuance of their craft.

• Groups discuss & explore problems & questions from different perspectives. 

• Solitary skills like writing music and literature, come to life when people come together to compare their work and give one another feedback.

Design your course to foster community by:

• Swapping lecture content for demo content [sync or async]

• Taking a project-based approach - i.e. have learners produce, compare & give feedback on one another’s outputs [sync or async]
  

Design Differentiator #2: Accountability

Cohort-based courses deliberately recreate a number of types of social accountability.

Learners who participate in CBCs:

• Are expected to “ship” outputs regularly

• Are responsible for supporting & contributing to the overall success of a team

• Are often required to share their outputs in a portfolio

• Typically complete a final “showcase” project

Design your course to deliver accountability by:

• Taking a project-based approach - i.e. have learners produce, compare & give feedback on one another’s outputs [sync or async]

• Requiring learners to work in teams and/or support one another [sync or async]

Design Differentiator #3: Transformation

When people talk about online learning, they get get hooked on the importance of content. The true value of a learning experience lies in the experience and its ability to transform people.

Transformational learning only happens deep inside communities of challenge & practice - spaces where we can feel the delight of support and the pain of challenge and accountability.

Transformation happens when we have a visceral experience of pushing and striving against all odds to overcome a difficult challenge together.

This is perhaps where CBCs are most powerful:

• They are typically designed as short intensive “bootcamp” style experiences which intentionally push learners to the edge of their capabilities.

• They provide a visceral experience which pushes learners to overcome a difficult challenge & do something new and unexpected, together.

Design your course to deliver transformation by:

• Designing learning experiences which sit at the very edges of your learners’ ZPD - i.e. experiences which are challenging enough to drive transformation. 

• Designing for intensity: short, intensive, hands-on experiences with tangible outputs shipped regularly.

• Designing for support: provide spaces - e.g. Discord & Slack - for your learners to connect & work through the experience together, both as learners and humans.

---

Happy Designing 👋

One more thing…. You can apply for a place on the Course Design Accelerator here. It’s a four week, hands-on, cohort-based design sprint where we work together to design or redesign a course of your choice using the science of learning.

If you’re a fan of learning science, you may also want to subscribe to the Learning Science Digest, a monthly summary of peer reviewed research on learning science, translated into course design practices - check it out!