The benefits of learning with a group in a cohort-based course

Credit to Tiago Forte’s article: The Future of Education is Community: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses

What is cohort-based learning?

A cohort-based course refers to a style of learning where a group of learners move through an online course together.

An instructor provides structure and guidance, but much of the learning happens via peer interactions. Students share with each other what they’re learning, or how they are applying it in the real world, motivating each other to stay on track.

Cohorts aren’t new. This is how we learned at school – alongside our peers, with real-time interaction, under the guidance of a teacher, in a cohort in the same room together.

Our event management course

Our 7-week intensive online event management course uses this beneficial cohort approach, bringing together event organisers and Council Event Officers from across Australia into a group of motivated learners.

The course embraces a combination of pre-recorded background content which presents key concepts, which students learn from in their own time (very flexible!), together with a weekly live ‘classroom’ for discussions, coaching, interacting, asking questions, delving deeper into specific cases, and sharing lived experiences as event organisers. The learnings in the recorded webinars are brought to life in the live webinar discussions.

A large part of the value of the program comes from students’ interactions with each other. Discussions are facilitated with a discussion forum (on a platform many participants use regularly already: Facebook, in a private group), and in breakout rooms in the live webinars, such as to brainstorm solutions to commonly experienced challenges. The chat in the live webinars is also usually lively, as participants ask follow-up questions, and share interesting links, resources they recommend, solutions they have found, challenges they want advice on, and their lived experiences in relation to the topic being discussed.

What makes a cohort-based course work?

According to Tiago Forte, there are four elements that distinguish cohort-based online courses from other types of online courses, such as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which have low completion rates. These are:

• Community

• Accountability

• Interaction

• Impact

Community

We learn by watching how experts do things, through group discussions where we explore topics from different perspectives, in a team where we encourage each other to push harder towards a common goals, and with peers who can offer each other constructive feedback.

Learning communities are built when students frequently see and hear each other while sharing the same experience.

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 or employers. With people showing up live on video under their real names, relationships can transcend the boundaries of the course and extend out into the ‘real’ world. We can intentionally create the conditions for community to emerge. - Tiago Forte

Accountability

Event committees know about accountability! - coming prepared to a meeting, and doing our share of the tasks so together we deliver a successful event.

Accountability comes from relationships formed through direct, meaningful interactions, and accountability helps students complete a course. While our live Q&A sessions are recorded, there is so much value for participants who join in with their questions from their learnings during the week.

A lot of our course’s value is in being able to pick the brains of an event development expert and of a classroom full of peers who have faced and solved similar challenges!

Interaction

Tiago Forte sums up our aim for our live webinars perfectly:

Live interaction that is only possible via video calls brings many more aspects of our humanity into the learning experience: vulnerable sharing, amusement and surprise, irreverence and wit, laughing and crying, victory and disappointment. These things cannot be conveyed through pre-produced content or a chat-based forum.

We also share these experiences with special guests that we all wouldn’t be able to chat with in person - we invite them to call in and share their expertise with the group, as well.

Impact

We’ve separated out background information and expert advice from the transformational learning that happens when we share knowledge and support each other - this is where cohort learning shines. Rather than “the frictionless convenience we’ve come to expect online” (Tiago Forte), a community of peers learning together feeds our desire for meaningful human interactions.

Other benefits

Some other benefits of the online format are the cost savings - without a physical classroom, no one has to spend money on travel, accommodation, or teaching facilities - and the flexibility - the content is easily updated as event trends change and with new advancements in event management.

In our Premium Accelerator Program, we also bring together the event organisers of one region, doubling the impact by creating local collaborative networks between event organisers that can support cost saving initiatives such as sharing equipment, or labour saving initiatives such as labour sharing.