(2021-03-09) Forte The Future Of Education Is Community The Rise Of Cohortbased Courses

Tiago Forte: The Future of Education is Community: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses. We are in the midst of the fourth wave of online education (virtual learning).

First Wave: The MOOCs - 2008

Pioneered by elite universities like Harvard and MIT through the EdX platform, and Stanford through Udacity.

the people who tended to successfully complete MOOCs were the same highly educated people who already had a college degree. And even then, completion rates were very low.

Second Wave: The Marketplaces - 2010

It was led by for-profit companies like Udemy and Skillshare, who sought to answer a new question: “How can we make money with online courses?”

problems with the marketplace model came to the surface within just a few years. The companies that owned these platforms began to use their control to their advantage, offering deep discounts (sometimes 90% or more) to improve their growth and revenue numbers. Instructors had no control over their own pricing

The top instructors began leaving the marketplaces, taking their rapidly growing audiences with them. This exodus sparked the third wave: the Toolkits.

Third Wave: The Toolkits - 2014

...led by companies like Thinkific, Kajabi, and Teachable.

the toolkits made it possible to build your own “white-labeled” school

Some of the biggest names in the emerging movement of “online creators” moved their offerings to their own white-labeled virtual schools. People like Pat Flynn and Amy Porterfield pioneered the path of making a living by building virtual products (such as courses, ebooks, podcasts, subscriptions, events, and content) and selling them directly to their own audience.

The limitations of the toolkit model eventually started to reveal themselves around 2017. As empowering as this third wave was, it demanded too much of instructors.

It became clear that self-paced courses demanded too much of the learner: too much time, too much energy, and too much dedication

Now the pendulum finally shifted to the students’ problem: how to reliably achieve the results they were promised.

Fourth Wave: The Cohorts

...referring 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.

Some cohort-based programs (such as Marie Forleo’s B School) embraced the “flipped classroom” model

Others (like Seth Godin’s AltMBA) did away with pre-recorded content altogether, opting to focus completely on project-based work executed over a series of short sprints.

I created my own CBC in late 2016

Cohorts can now come together from dozens of countries, meet any time of the day or night, focus on niche topics that relatively few people are interested in, and adapt the curriculum on the fly.

There are 4 elements that distinguish cohort-based online courses from earlier waves:
Community
Accountability
Interaction
Impact

Community

If you look at how human beings learn, it almost always happens in community

Even with solitary skills like writing, coming together in writing groups to give each other feedback is a critical part of improvement.

The intensive environment of a cohort is like a pressure cooker for friendships – they can happen in a fraction of the usual time. And not just friendships, but all kinds of relationships: students find mentors, collaborators, thought partners, coaches, advisors, and even clients, employers, or romantic partners.

Accountability

reinvents in a virtual environment the many layers of social accountability and support found in traditional schools (peer pressure)

balance of encouragement and challenge

True accountability comes from being in relationship.

Cohorts naturally provide a strong form of accountability by virtue of being ephemeral. The video calls may be recorded, but they don’t capture the essence of the live experience. This creates a kind of helpful scarcity, where students have to show up while it’s happening or else it’s gone

Interaction

The live interaction that is only possible via video calls brings many more aspects of our humanity into the learning experience

These things cannot be conveyed through pre-produced content or a chat-based forum.

Impact

The true value of education lies in its ability to transform people. It is transformational learning that cohort-based courses are ideally suited for. Learning that shifts people’s identities so much in such a short period of time that they barely recognize themselves on the other side of it.

Whether they know it or not, online learners are looking for a rite of passage.

The business of education

The structure and accountability of cohort-based courses allows them to do something that was never possible before: demonstrate consistently strong student outcomes

As quality standards shoot up, the ceiling of how much online educators can charge is also rising

A new era of democratized learning

Some have criticized the expense and exclusivity of cohort-based courses. They’ve been called elitist and overpriced. But I think this new kind of education will make online learning far more open, accessible, and democratic than ever before.

CBCs are unbundling the best parts of the university experience while maintaining (or even improving) their quality

cohort-based courses will democratize online education because they provide the structure and accountability that people need to succeed in their learning. The most underprivileged students are also the ones most in need of that support.