Building a product for cohort based courses

With the rise of cohort-led learning experiences like On Deck and the pandemic accelerating live and synchronous online experiences, CBCs are now at an inflexion point. So how would we design a product for hosting CBCs?

Let us take a step back and define what we mean by a product. A product is any item or service you sell to serve a customer’s need or want. (Ref: What is a product?). For a CBC, what is the actual product? A Learning Management System (LMS) to host and deliver content? The content of the program meant to deliver outcomes?

If we think deeper, the LMS is just a platform that hosts the product/course that solves the customer need. For the purpose of this article, we will focus on the LMS/tech platform design that hosts the content. Let's call this hypothetical platform - LiveLearn. (A very unimaginative name, I agree! But bear with me.)

Let's look at the different stakeholders, we would need to design LiveLearn for:

• Learners - people who will consume the courses. The ones who will consume the course on the platform.

• Instructors - people who deliver courses to aspiring learners.

• Course Managers - persons who manage the course logistics and other admin work.

• Super Admin - somewhat like root access, observing the overall metrics of everyone on the platform.

How we build LiveLearn would depend on who is paying the money. If it is a B2C use case, where creators/boot camps are directly enabling learners to learn, we would have to optimize our learner experience. If it is a B2B use case, where companies are asking learners to upskill, we would have to optimize for the course manager/admin. In short, we look at the person paying us, and then we optimize the design for the same. Another interesting variation is B2B2C, we are building LiveLearn for creators who in turn are charging their audiences.

Let's keep it simple and consider a simple B2C use case. (I will think and write about other use cases in future blog posts.) The typical phases of a learner's journey on LiveLearn would be:

• Onboarding

• Engagement

• Retention

• Referral

As we think of a learner's journey, we need to understand what is the learners' jobs to be done. The learner has come to obtain a skill or gain knowledge. A good criterion for a course is to increase the proficiency of the learner by x%. But the problem with this metric is that it is a lagging one. It is measured only after the course is done.

For this, a few things need to happen:

• The learner needs to consume the lessons or course material for the skill.

• The learner needs to attend the sessions regularly.

• The learner needs to attempt the assignments.

• The learner needs to apply for the jobs on the job board. (This is only for career pivoting courses.)

So the first phase of onboarding must show the learner the logistics of the course as well as how to navigate the platform. Here building a social interaction would help. The better we enable learners to make friends or study groups, the more are the chances that the learner would succeed in the course. Social interaction and community building are important for CBCs to succeed. Another option is to send them to community or forums with icebreakers or other bonding questions.

The next phase is to build engagement. For this, we need to ensure that the learner gets the initial wins in the course - say completed the 1st lesson, finished the 1st assignment or quiz. Gamification and building streaks is a good way. Education is delayed gratification and we can't give dopamine shots like other social apps. Virality is very difficult (except for language apps like Duolingo or Toucan. Language learning is very bite-sized which might not be possible for other courses.) So motivating the learner, through social proof (showing how many have completed the assignment, or what % of people who completed assignment went on to finish the course, etc.)

Typically, the first 20-30% of the course is hard for a learner to build momentum, and here is where maximum support needs to be provided. This is the retention stage for the learner. Once the initial momentum is achieved, the learner completes the rest of the course by himself. He knows where to go if stuck. Another key factor for engagement is the number of live sessions attended. From my experience, I have seen this to be a good leading indicator for course completion.

Once the learner has completed the course, we must enable demonstrable and shareable proof of success for the learner. It could be a certificate or learning streak, something that the learner is proud of. The key aspect - it must feel like an achievement. This would bring referrals for the next iteration of the course.

Some of the leading metrics to track:

• # of messages sent to other members of the cohort.

• % of live sessions attended.

• no of assignments or quizzes attempted/completed.

Now if these are the leading metrics to track, we need to build this view for the instructors and course managers. A slight difference in their views - instructors must be shown more average-level views to have an idea of the cohort (with an option to search and deep dive into individual learners' performance).

For the course manager, we can use a triage system w.r.t the learners. A good system could be green for people on track for course completion, amber for people slightly off track and red for completely off track. These can be hardcoded initially; we can refine the thresholds with more data. The first level of intervention could be simple email drips, and the next level could be personal and done by the course manager.

There are a lot more nuances in platform design for great learner outcomes. The key is to always remember that the platform aims to enable delivery at scale and push learners to complete the course.

Education is a very long game. It is hard and challenging, and it must never be confusing for the learner to navigate the product.