Online learning and education systems can examine various learning models to help students. Since Covid-19, students relying more on online courses than in-person classes. Working professionals are also following suit. This online educational content delivery boom influenced teachers and learning content creators to enter the ecosystem and create some great courses. While most creators are creating lectures, slideshows, videos, and animated courses, cohort-based courses come out as a fresh approach that school students like the most. Continue reading about cohort-based learning content and some platforms where you can create such content effortlessly.
What Are Cohort-Based Courses?
Cohort-based learning content facilitates a collaborative approach to studying in which learners or users advance together during a project, course, or program. Mentors or instructors lead the study group of learners to achieve given milestones. The course design could be anything, but there should be two specific goals. One, the cohort or the study group must achieve some end goals. These results could be learning a new skill like coding or being able to solve mathematical problems, and so on. In a cohort-based study group, students learn collaboration, team play, community support, etc., from early in their life. Hence, these learners are more effective when you field them in real-life business situations. Now that you have understood what cohort-based courses are, it is time to find out some popular platforms where you can create and market your educational content. Here are the top choices by experts in this field:
Teachfloor
Teachfloor is the most popular and dedicated platform for all things of cohort-based courses. It empowers you to develop cohort-based learning content under your professional brand and publish it on its platform. You would love it for its easy-to-use online payment portal, student management tool, and effortless Zoom integrations for multiple cohort classes in one instance. Its salient features are:
Own a learning academy comprising many cohort communitiesCourse curriculum builderStudent community management portalRewarding cohort groups or individual studentsCollect online paymentsEmbed content from 3rd party tools
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is the next-generation course builder with features for cohort-based learning content. Your students will get an immersive experience by becoming your cohort course member made on this platform for the following attractions:
Member profile pageTop membersMembers near youMember categoryAmbassadors
The portal is also great for building world-class communities that are professional yet conversational. You can include various content in your cohort course for maximum community engagement. For example, you can add videos, articles, and chats to your course curriculum.
Teachmore
You can also try out Teachmore to sell your cohort-based courses online. It lets you create course content and deliver sessions. You can create your apps and landing pages within the portal. With an appropriate paid plan, you can get expert sales and marketing support from the Teachmore team to increase your profit margin.
Thinkific
Yet another popular website for learning content, including cohort courses, is Thinkific. It enables you to build international-quality cohort courses online and deliver that to multiple cohort communities. You can monetize your talent, effort, and content by creating one-time payments or subscriptions. The portal is suitable for any training-related profession, like lifestyle coaches, gym instructors, academic teachers, professional instructors, etc. It offers all the tools and functionalities you need for a cohort-based course. For example:
Custom domains for communitiesDrip schedulingCross-sellingLive quizzes and contestsLive Q&AsCommunity spaces and reminders
Scenes
Scenes is the white-labeled Discord for professional learning communities. It lets you moderate, manage, and monetize many communities from one app. The best part is that you can book a demo for 30 minutes and try the platform for 14 days for free. Key platform features are:
Scalable smartphone apps for students and teachersVideo and audio-enabled virtual rooms for communitiesOnline forums, media, events, chats, and moreCommunity shop and coinPermissions and rolesCompatible with tablets, mobiles, and PCs
Virtually
Virtually can resolve all your live events-related problems for your cohort-based course. It automates calendar invitations, Zoom meeting link generation, writing and sharing recaps, uploading recorded lessons, and all other activities in a cohort-based online course. This platform also lets you monitor the status of your course and how your students are performing. Its compatibility with various popular applications for integration makes it an ideal choice for creators. They can integrate Virtually with Zoom, Google Calendar, Zapier, Salesforce, SQL, Slack, Gmail, and many more.
Maven
Maven offers you an opportunity to make a course from your hard-earned knowledge. Here, you can create cohort-based courses and offers your students the best-in-class learning experience. On this platform, you can monetize your expertise effortlessly and grow your business from a single easy-to-use dashboard. If you are new to online teaching or course creation, Maven will be particularly helpful. You can join its free program on how to become a successful cohort-based course creator before building your course. Creators will also access its resource library containing templates, worksheets, and how-to guides.
EducateMe
EducateMe is a Cohort-based learning platform that helps you save the time your spend to manage your courses by 60%. This platform will let you discover your assignments’ full potential and reduce the student drop-out rate. Teachers can create their course syllabus using its LMS. It even has a Kanban-based solution to track assignments. EducateMe converts your learners’ activities into analytics so you can measure their progress. Additionally, you get Zoom integration and the Jisti web version embedded with this platform.
Disco
Disco lets you connect and transform your learning community with your cohort-based courses. It helps create social learning experiences as the learners engage with you through these courses. As you design courses on this platform, you can add lessons, assignments, and projects with the curriculum builder. It offers Zoom integration, recording upload, and calendar invitation auto-send to make learning easier. Teachers can seamlessly accept payments for their courses with built-in Stripe integration. Disco is also ideal for monitoring member progress and tracking their engagement.
Clickto
If you want to contribute to global learning while making some money out of it, Clickto should be your go-to option. It is a platform dedicated to cohort-based learning that one can utilize for enrichment programs. Now, connecting with your learner community across the world becomes easy with the courses you designed. This platform has been designed for scaling up during your journey as a teacher, as it has everything you need for growing an online learning business. You can be online in a jiffy, manage your schedule, and record attendance automatically on Clickto. It also allows you to store all your digital assets in one place. You can customize the courses you create here to make them enjoyable.
FreshLearn
FreshLearn is a perfect choice for launching Cohort-based learning content. On this platform, teachers can create and launch interactive cohort-based courses in less than 1 hour. It modernized the conventional time-taking process of designing such courses so you can make courses seamlessly with drag and drop builder without writing any code. This platform supports multiple types of content for Google Meet, Zoom, and similar tools. Students from anywhere in the world can join the live classes on FreshLearn. Here, you can deliver a lasting learning experience by monitoring the activities of every single learner while managing the whole class as a single unit. On this platform, real-time interactive discussions are also possible via comments. Moreover, creators can easily monetize their courses through one-time or subscription-based payments.
Difference Between Cohort-Based Courses and Self-Paced Courses
#1. Community Building
Like-minded students and professionals form a group with cohort-based study styles. Hence, such learners naturally grow a community-building instinct. Learners of self-paced courses study individually. They rarely get any chance for community building unless they join live online classes.
#2. Community-Based Learning
Your students learn in a group. They celebrate wins together or solve challenges together. Hence, they can become team players for the future workforce. Self-paced online learners usually perform all the studies, labs, and assessments themselves. So, there is a lack of team play.
#3. Networking
When professionals, graduates, and so on joins a cohort-based course, they connect. They learn about the latest in industry, where to look for better jobs, get job references, and so on. In self-paced courses, you can not grow your professional network until you use professional social media sites like LinkedIn.
#4. Interactions and Feedback
Students interact with their peers and share feedback. Also, the cohort group becomes mentally prepared to accept constructive criticism in front of a group. Learners coming from self-paced online courses do not possess the experience of feedback from supervisors. They need to learn how to work on feedback in the workplace.
#5. Transforming Students
In cohort-based courses, students share experiences, knowledge, expertise, etc., with each other. There is no 1st or 2nd place. The whole team needs to succeed. You can easily change the mindset of a professional or learner by assigning them cohort classes. On the contrary, self-paced learners are more concerned about their grades.
Cohort-Based Courses Are More Profitable and Fulfilling
Cohort-based courses are more fulfilling than conventional online or offline courses because it offers better memory retention and course completion. Since your students learn through discussions, Q&As, and text content and apply the learnings, they retain more. According to a Learnopoly report, there is a 41% better memory retention. Online self-paced courses mainly suffer from course completion issues. On the flip side, Learnopoly says cohort-based learning courses come with a more than 90% completion rate since the students learn in a community. On the profitability point, cohort-based courses are the top choices for corporate learning. According to Skyquest, the worldwide corporate training market was valued at $345.56 in 2021 and should reach $493.32 billion by 2028. As you can see, there is a void to be filled by creating high-quality cohort learning content for enterprises and earning handsomely.
Essential Features of a Cohort-Based Course Platform
Cohort-based learning is completely different than the existing education system. Here, the teacher must stress student vs. student engagement and group vs. teacher engagement. No online learning portal can handle such advanced educational concepts, nor can it provide the tools you need. Before choosing your cohort-based course publishing portal, look for the following features in the platform you choose:
#1. Instructor-Led Live Learning System for a Group
The platform should offer technologies to host a live instructor-led class for one or several groups.
#2. Cohort Course and Curriculum Builder
The portal must provide simple, no-code, and drag-and-drop course builders for cohort-based learning content.
#3. Cohort Course Player
The students and the teachers will interact with each other through a virtual environment. That environment will also play the cohort-based courses. Hence, the course player should be compatible with most devices like tablets, mobile, and laptops. Also, the content player should be easy to navigate.
#4. Cohort Content Dripping
You may want to schedule your cohort-based courses to streamline the learning events. Also, you can not just include all the learning content in one course. It would be best if you spread it in different episodes so that students stay connected with you throughout the season. Hence, a content dripping tool is a must.
#5. Management Tools
The online learning platform should also offer a cohort management tool for the following tasks:
Creating new cohortsAdding or removing learners to one or many cohortsCommunication between the students and teachersCreating a cohort managerTracking the performance of each cohort in your account
#6. Community Spaces
The portal must also allow you to create different communities for the same cohort-based course. It will bring in more revenue for you. Not to mention the audience base will also grow.
#7. Interactive Sessions
Platforms must facilitate Zoom integration or native live streaming capabilities for interactive sessions like live doubt-clearing classes, Q&As, group coaching calls, and so on.
Final Words
So far, you have gone through the basic definition of cohort-based courses. You have also discovered some excellent portals to start publishing your cohort-based educational content for learners. Furthermore, you learned how to differentiate your cohort-based content from conventional online learning content like self-paced lecture videos or LMS courses. You may also be interested in the best learning management systems for any business.
