Cohort Based Courses nudging education innovation
The promise of CBCs in a crowded online education market
Hey, Edstreet community! I’m back.
In this issue of Edstreet, I share insights on one of the fast-growing education innovations called Cohort Based Courses, aka CBCs.
A little fun fact: I’ve built, delivered, and evaluated different kinds of courses globally for 7 years in online, offline, and hybrid learning environments but never knew they could be called CBCs until about 6 months back.
So if you’re hearing the term ‘CBC’ for the first time, you are not late to the party!
What is a CBC?
A CBC is a category of online learning exploding in popularity these days.
Gagan Biyani and Wes Kao coined the term CBC in November 2020, giving rise to a new wave of online education. Biyani was also the brain behind the first wave of online education, as one of the founders of Udemy in 2009.
CBC is a live, cohort-based learning - Gagan Biyani
A cohort-based course is taken by a group of students (a cohort) at the same time. It can take place online, in a virtual space, or in a physical classroom. A group of students enter the course together and over a specific period of time they go through a syllabus, together. The time-bound nature of a CBC along with the fact that students are mastering the material together is what differentiates it from a self-paced course where students can consume the course material alone and a course community is optional. - Aki
A CBC refers to a group of learners who join an online course together and then move through it at the same pace. The instructor provides structure and guidance, but much of the learning happens peer-to-peer, as students share what they’re discovering in real-time and encourage each other to keep going. - Tiago Forte
To summarise, CBCs are a digital face-to-face learning experience, in which students benefit from learning together, generating insights, and being a part of a community.
Why bet on CBC?
I’m all about large-scale systems change in education but I also have this innate drive to be entrepreneurial - to build and engage in education innovation models.
In that spirit, I’m super excited to share that I will be a mentor in the On Deck Course Creator Fellowship, helping course creators build and ship their transformational online courses - CBCs, Evergreen, and Hybrid.
My #1 reason to bet on CBCs is that student transformation is their ultimate promise. That too in an online environment!
Student transformation happens when knowledge and skills are co-constructed by a student and teacher as a part of the community, rather than an individual teacher lecturing at students. The first wave of online education represented by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) missed out on the community aspect of education, that’s why we need CBCs now.
knowledge simply cannot be 'transmitted' or 'conveyed ready-made' to another person - Jean Piaget
The act of learning with others as a part of the community is the key ingredient of the student transformation in CBCs. It brings back the individual learner to the community of like-minded learners.
CBCs are applying the same concept of community that has made education tick for generations: learning together, in community, in real-time, with everyone contributing, to the online environment. That's why, I say, CBCs are nudging innovation in online education.
The sense of community is built through peer-to-peer learning, feedback loops, actively facilitated zoom calls, Q&As, reflection questions, 1:1s, slack channels, and interactions. These are just some learning strategies that activate active learning in a digital environment.
Ultimately CBCs create a space for active learning by embedding community elements, which has been missing in self-paced courses. Evidence shows that active learning is really critical for creating transformational learning experiences and for learning to stick in the mind of a learner.
Also, CBCs continue to convince the world that student engagement is possible in online education. For instance, Wes Kao's AltMBA cohort-based course delivered over 95% completion rate, validating that the new format works. Just so that you make sense of this number, the MOOCs, which have been a mainstream category of online education since 2009, have an average completion rate of 3%.
And, yes! we need more evidence on CBCs to fully understand their impact and potential.
CBCs and their impact on the wider education ecosystem
The systemic impact of CBCs is inevitable and unimaginable at this stage but we might have a better understanding of their impact in the next 3-5 years.
I share two examples of the positive impact that is possible with CBCs at scale.
The best teachers will be celebrities
Today teaching is one of the most undervalued professions in the world. In 2016, when I visited Bangladesh to learn more about its education system, it was appalling to learn that both the school peon and teacher in a school received similar compensation.
For the majority of us, it is a stretch to think that the best teachers will soon be celebrities.
No, I don't mean celebrities as teachers on Masterclass.
I am talking about the course creators who are practitioners first and are upskilling to become online teachers. They are no less than celebrities in their domains and for their learners.
These course creators effectively leverage technology to create their own distinguished brand, transcend geographical barriers, and deliver courses from anywhere in the world to live cohorts of students.
These course creators will be practitioners delivering courses, not academics.
Practitioners don’t just understand their discipline — they live it. They embody what they teach. They live at the frontier of their domain and push it forward themselves.
They speak with chromatic energy, they’ll prize simplicity, not complexity, and they’ll be prolific, polarizing, and personal. The best professors will be inspiring, entertaining, and personality-driven. They’ll establish emotional connections with students, at scale - David Perell
The top-selling course creators influencing the future of teaching and creator economy are:
Ali Abdaal teaches people how to be Part-Time YouTubers and has generated $295k in annual revenues from CBC.
David Perell teaches how to write on the internet to a cohort with 173.5k followers.
Tiago Forte's course on building a second brain is delivering its 12th cohort in April 2021.
I'll leave you to make sense of this possibility with a thought experiment:
What if instead of giving money back to alumni institutions, you were able to make a tax-free donation directly to the teachers who had the biggest impact on your life? Those that taught about your hobbies, interests, career paths, etc.
I believe the next 10 years will be most exciting for the future of teaching - pushing the quality, standards, and rigor of the profession.
The next 30 years will be about Lifelong Learning
In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will not merely need to invent new ideas and products - you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again. — Yuval Noah Harari
So what's changing in education and work?
Access to information and communities is cheap, global, and decentralized and the need to adapt and upskill is essential.
Workers need to embrace a life of learning and self-evolution in order to thrive. Lifelong learning has personally helped me transition between careers, countries, and companies.
The world seeks to label us, categorize us and pack us neatly into boxes as analysts, writers, researchers, entrepreneurs. But we are humans, not objects.
We are vicious. We dance around the lines between solid and liquid. We change and evolve. We ebb and flow. We shrink and grow. - Salman
So how do we survive these waves of complex changes around us?
Luckily, we have a playbook for thriving in this changing world.
Be a Polymath.
Polymaths engage in extended learning across disparate fields and apply their learnings to connect ideas and solve problems in unique ways. They’re well suited to thrive in a constantly changing environment. - Salman
Workers in the 21st century learn in batches and bite-sized chunks.
David Perell wrote that, “spontaneous curiosity drive daily learning; timely projects drive weekly learning; long-term projects drive monthly learning; long-term goals drive annual learning plan.” This is where CBCs are going to be part and parcel of everyday life and work.
CBCs are just starting out, building a template for lifelong learning.
They are enabling more individuals to monetize their knowledge and increase access to quality education at a cheaper rate.
Additional Resources:
A curated list of resources on CBCs, lifelong learning, and the future of education.
✍Course Creators Weekly newsletter by Merott is a one-stop-shop for all the resources and content on CBCs.
🎙 Andrew Barry's podcast, youtube, and Twitter are my go-to place for high-quality, evidence-informed content on how to teach on the internet.
😎 I called out On Deck in my post. Yes, I’m sold on their vision to create a 100-year institution for lifelong learning. This post is your best bet to read more about it.
💥 Maven, Virtually, and Graphy are platforms built to automate and democratize CBCs. It enables instructors around the world to build engaging, interactive online courses than MOOCs.
🔹 Here is why I am bullish about the future of education.
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