Over the past few years, cohort-based learning has become one of the most effective ways to learn online.
Cohorts offer learners a way to navigate new material with built-in support, accountability, and relationship building that keeps learners from giving up when things get hard.
Cohorts also typically rely on project-based learning, which allows them to come out of a cohort experience with a tangible deliverable (a skill, an enhanced portfolio, a job, etc.).
While cohorts themselves are picking up lots of steam in the live online learning space, there are a variety of different ways that organizations are choosing to manage their cohorts in order to maximize impact and engagement for their learners.
As learning programs continue to explore cohort-based learning structures, two predominant approaches have emerged: cohort-based courses and cohort-based communities.
While cohort-based courses typically have a fixed start and end date, cohort-based communities are ongoing, with new members joining a cohort-based experience and then flowing into a new community where they can continue to engage with their own cohort and the entire community of prior cohorts.
With cohort-based communities, the meat of the cohort is the onboarding phase, which aims to orient new members to initial materials in addition to teaching them how to navigate the events, resources, and connection opportunities offered by the community.
New cohorts are often added every month or quarter to the broader community, which has the added benefit of revitalizing the existing community every time a new cohort of members joins.
Learn the difference between two other baffling terms in live online learning here.
One major benefit of cohort-based communities is being able to leverage recurring revenue. If your learners are paying a longer term subscription fee (or a higher ticket one time payment from when they join), you don’t need to re-earn revenue for every cohort and each member produces a higher lifetime value for your organization.
Nevertheless, given that a community is often larger than an individual cohort, cohort-based communities can be a lot of work. That’s why it’s usually necessary to hire a dedicated community manager to support your community, share events and content, and make sure members are connecting and engaging.
On Deck runs 20+ fellowship programs for professional development. While many of their programs started as 8-week or 12-week programs, multiple On Deck fellowships are transitioning to a yearlong subscription model, where members take part in a cohort onboarding period (typically 4 weeks), which then funnels into the broader community.
These new cohorts join monthly or quarterly. From there, all members can engage or attend events together, no matter which cohort they originally joined with.
Ship30for30 is a cohort-based community that starts with an intensive 30 day challenge that you complete alongside a cohort of your peers: publish 30 pieces of writing on the internet in 30 days.
That challenge serves as your cohort onboarding into the broader Ship30for30 community hosted on Circle. There, you can continue engaging with fellow Ship30-ers, reviewing content, and attending events. This structure helps keep members engaged long after their original cohort wraps up.
Pivot offers 16 week cohort-based experiences that funnel members into a yearlong community membership. With cohorts focused on building a career in styling and fashion, the initial cohort offers an opportunity to connect with peers and the subsequent year provides the necessary tools and support for members to continue building the career of their dreams.
The community offers 200+ events per year, including workshops, peer circles, and chats with experts, motivating members to stay active year round.
Learn why events are essential for online communities here.
Want to hold more events for your cohort-based course or community? Virtually can help.
Virtually lets you automate the hairy logistics of hosting events on Zoom. We take care of scheduling, sending reminders, and tracking attendance so you can focus on delivering an exceptional member experience (while also playing well with your chosen community platform).
Schedule a demo call with a Virtually team member to learn how to simplify your event management or get started for free.
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Laura Marks is Head of Customer Experience at Virtually