My learnings from running cohort-based courses - Part 2

Hey! ?? I’m Archie! Welcome to my newsletter. Among other things, I’m a creator-instructor of an online cohort-based course to help highly skilled immigrants learn about the fastest and merit-based green card - EB1-A. I also manage a community for my cohort participants.

In this two-part series, I’ll be sharing the decision-making on course mechanics, operations, managing a community, and some learnings along the way. In part 1, I covered what goes into launching a cohort-based course. I’ll continue in this post with a focus on operations and management.?

Managing a course

Teaching a live cohort involves a lot of storytelling. You have to make it compelling, and keep the audience hooked. Imagine watching a YouTube video without the ability to rewind, adjust the speed, or fast forward. That’s a live class for your students.?

Here are three things that help maintain a constant attention span, make the learning “stick”, and overall success,

1/ Energy levels, engagement, and breaking the monotony

When leading a room full of people, adjust your energy level to 1-2 notches above the average energy of the room. Throughout the class, introduce variations in form of audio-visuals(screen transitions, voice modulation, variation in energy). Make the session interactive with questions, small-group exercises, breakouts, pauses/breaks, and activities in chat. This will prevent the students from tuning out. Any sort of difference, contrast, transition, or anything unexpected alerts our brains.

2/ Sprinkle some humor and make it fun

Laughter is a remarkably powerful tool for engagement and stickiness. Having some sort of relevant entertainment not only keeps the audience engaged, but also helps them remember what they’ve learned. Plan to inject some relevant laughs into your course material – a funny story or a meme can go a long way. Be careful when introducing humor, since it’s easy to go overboard with it. Your students didn’t enroll in your course to be entertained. Entertainment should be a tool for effective learning and not the sole purpose of your classes.

3/ Continue engagement after the course

Maintaining engagement with students beyond the course is a great way to unlock continued value for both instructors and students. The community provides a platform to engage with your existing students long after the course is complete. However, it also requires continuous work from you to keep it active and engaged. Some other ways for continued engagement are demo days, periodic check-ins, continuous value “drops” in form of worksheets, articles, guest sessions, follow-up 1:1s,?and, office hours.

In the long run, you can scale yourselves better through a community, have more leverage, and, an existing engaged customer base. And, offers students an opportunity to continuously learn through the community and receive variable rewards throughout.

Here are some other operational things to keep in mind:

1/ Take a before-after quiz

At the beginning of the cohort, ask your students, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much would you rate your confidence in achieving X?”. Here X is the primary outcome of your course. Take note of it and ask the same question at the end of the cohort. That approximately and immediately informs both the instructor and students of the realized value of the course. As long as students are scoring higher post-course, they’re getting value from the course. Of course, the higher the delta, the better the value.

Asking it before the cohort begins gives you a solid benchmark at the individual, as well as cohort level - perhaps a certain kind of persona is drawing the most value, and another not so much. It gives your students a solid benchmark at a personal level.

While it is extremely common to take a post-course survey, a before-after metric is missing in most cases. It helps with experimentation, cohort analysis, follow-ups, and iterating on the course.

2/ Launch a Community

It is now well-known that people come for the instructor but stay for the community. That said, managing a community is not for everyone. In fact, having no community is better than having a poorly-managed community. If you can do it well, it adds tremendous value for your students since they learn from you, and they learn from each other. You and your community become a super node on the internet. It is a strategic flywheel that is hard to replicate, offers scalability, and builds healthy long-term engagement. Although it is incredibly rewarding, it is a lot of continued investment. So, don’t rush into it and make it a carefully thought-through decision.

3/ Take your preferences into account

Finally, it is easy to be swayed away by all the advice on the internet. Always remember what’s right for someone else may not be the right approach for you. There are things that may come to you naturally, so, identify those and double down on your own superpowers. Select a topic that excites you and a format that works for you. If you go against your natural self and force a certain thing because that’s what works, you may not do a great job at it. Before launching a course, think of things that give you energy and things that drain your energy. Design your course accordingly, especially for recurring commitments (like running a community). If you take your own preferences into account, you’ll come across authentically, be able to set the right expectations, sustainably build products, and do right by your customers.

My CBC stack and inspiration

Many people ask me about my CBC stack, it is pretty basic. These are tools that offer me the most value and most people (including myself) are already familiar with them. I am also deeply inspired by Daniel Vassallo's course on Small Bets. I often see what works over there and bring it over.

• Webflow for website (https://www.usasmartimmigration.com/)
• Bio.link for one link (https://bio.link/GETeb1a)
• Calendly for calendar management of discovery calls
• Stripe for payments
• Google Docs for content delivery
• Google Meet for video conference
• Discord for community
• Lu.ma for course reminders and calendar management

So, the tool stack is nothing fancy, somewhat old school, and extremely low-friction. There are many alternatives to these tools, including a fully managed CBC platform - Maven. It is easy to be caught up in evaluating various options, just pick the tools that suit you the best.

If you have questions regarding cohort-based courses, tweet them to me! If you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my posts on?Medium?and?Substack.