What is cohort-based learning: Benefits, best practices, and challenges

Cohort-based courses are the new winners in the digital economy, where employees need to update existing skills and acquire new ones regularly.

This is great news because traditional online courses aren’t doing very well. For instance, researchers from MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and other major universities have reported that online learners struggle to “achieve their goals”. A separate study found that only 2% out of a total of 23,577 students had completed their online course.

That’s not to say massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a total failure. As Luna Lovegood says in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: ‘You have to wait for somebody who gets it right, ….That way you learn’. For quite some time, MOOCs were a great way to address the changing educational and career-directed needs. But today, cohort-based courses are proving significantly more effective.

So what are cohort-based courses and what are their benefits and challenges? What cohort-based courses best practices should you follow? What’s the future of such courses? Stay with us, as we dig deeper to find answers to all such questions.

What is cohort-based learning?

Cohort-based learning is an educational model where learners together develop or build skills with the help of interactive, structured learning.

Two of the key features of cohort-based learning are clear start and end times, and an exchange of ideas, along with constructive feedback, among the learners.

Unlike MOOCs, where a learner may begin and complete (or, as it often happens, drop out) any time, cohort-based courses have fixed timelines. Cohort members enroll together, achieve learning milestones together, and facilitate completing the course together. Their collaborative approach to learning fosters improved engagement and regular peer-to-peer communication.

Learners, learning content and tools, teachers, and the teaching medium form the scaffolding of such courses. Better the knitting of the learners with the tools, the more effective the learning is. That’s exactly why you want to choose a platform that leverages technology to make learning deeper and communication easier.

The cohort-based learning experience

The cohort learning experience is unique because of several reasons. For instance, the role of the teacher is different. Here, the teacher isn’t merely a knowledge-provider or evaluator. The learning model makes them more of facilitators.

Through both synchronous and asynchronous learning, the participants are guided by the teacher towards ‘discovering’ knowledge. The learning program ensures individuals achieve their learning goals without compromising any of the overall organizational objectives.

Though conventional classroom learning too is time-bound like cohort-based learning, the two are very different. Conventional classes do not rely on learner engagement; individuals may proceed or be left behind without the rest of the learners playing any role in the performance of the outliers. Under the cohort model, everyone is accountable and rises together.

It’s not self paced learning either, because the supportive learning environment ‘lifts’ the individual learner who happens to fall behind for some reason. Group projects, for instance, are instrumental in how this is achieved.

Benefits of cohort-based learning

1. Establishes stronger relationships

If there’s one benefit that probably tops all other benefits of cohort-based learning, it is the ability to build stronger and deeper ties. The learning journey of the participants leads them to a point where everyone contributes to the growth of everyone else. The learning process sharpens their ability to connect and even proceed to cross-functional collaborations. This is one benefit that trumps most advantages of self paced courses.

You will also see learner engagement, because learners trust the model and their peers. Consequently, you have more contribution and more learning from each individual.

For the organization, this dynamic and collaborative approach of the cohort learning model ensures that new skills are acquired and retained faster and better.

2. Fundamentally changes learning

When quoting from cohort based learning examples, experts never fail to point out how the model fundamentally changes learning. A cohort learning program enhances accountability. Deadlines and peer support make sure everyone is staying on the top of their learning targets.

But that’s not even half the story. There is a great deal of knowledge sharing, and it becomes a culture to offer and collect ideas, insights, and inputs. You’ll see discussion boards active with enriched communication, owing to the variety of experience that learners bring in.

For the organization, the major benefit is how it shapes the culture. It breeds more openness and a commitment to ask for and accept support. It paves way for critical thinking and invigorates a spirit of experimentation as well as innovation.

3. Strengthens accountability

Personalized learning might work with highly disciplined and self-driven individuals. But as the numbers grow, you see a sharp decline in their course completion rates. The reason? Lack of clear accountability.

Which is exactly where cohort-based learning holds a clear edge. Along with feedback, learners provide one another both accountability and a trustable support system. Social learning takes participants beyond merely going through the course material. It makes staying on course and achieving learning goals more desirable and achievable.

For the organization, this accountability translates into better RoI and improved operational efficiency.

4. Develops soft skills

Starting from the early 19th century to almost the middle of the 20th century, literacy was a huge, in-demand skill. Today, some of the giant companies as diverse as Google, Bank of America, Hilton, and Starbucks are willing to ignore educational qualifications for the right fit. The ability to learn on the job and work as an effective team player have become hugely important.

Clearly, soft skills are becoming critical. Cohort-based learning inculcates and develops soft skills. The primary reason behind this is that this learning model is interactive; at every stage learners offer and accept different points of view. This not only helps them apply the professional capabilities they learn through the exercises but also equips them with soft skills that show them how to work effectively in a group.

For organizations, this benefit is a big plus because it subsequently enables them to hire people from diverse backgrounds.

5. Makes training scaleable and cost-effective

A cohort-based program helps organizations achieve strategic objectives because of the collaborative learning it drives. Learners come together to participate, contribute, learn, mentor, and learn from their peers. Nearly all these activities are scaleable. Once you have a technologically-strong platform, you can look forward to high-impact activities.

Group assignments facilitate peer-to-peer mentoring and learning. When you use a platform, there’s no need to have key resource people to be in the same room of in-person sessions; they can be separated by hundreds of miles and yet work as effectively as if they were seated next to one another.

For organizations, cohort-based learning makes sure that the different styles of learners do not come in the way of speeding up learning; peers will absorb the differences and facilitate accelerated learning that traditional education cannot.

Cohort-based learning best practices

All the advantages of cohort-based courses can materialize when the program follows best practices. Here is a brief list:

1. Focus on the curriculum

A curriculum that was suitable for a conventional classroom or even for MOOCs obviously won’t make the cut for cohort-based learning. That’s because cohort-based learning optimizes several things, including active and passive learning.

While designing the curriculum, you want to pay attention to the questions like:

What elements will best fan out into group learning?
Where will self-paced learning end and group activity begin?
How will the curriculum leverage the interactive nature of the course?
What stages can be modified or repeated to improve knowledge retention?
How will the teacher ensure they stay afloat and don’t keep slipping into conventional roles?

2. Go with the right platform

Your selection of the platform will pretty much influence what direction the course will take. Absence of a particular feature, for instance, forces the teacher to look for available alternative tools. And with that, you see a compromise in learning goals.

The top three things you should look for in a platform for your cohort-based learning are:

Critical features that you can’t do without, and will pretty much decide success
Convenient and seamless implementation, and what kind of support is available
Degree of customization possible and required

Care to read the detailed best practices for cohort-based programs? You can read all of it right here.

3. Define timelines and targeted results

What do you want the students enrolled to achieve? How soon do you want those goals to be realized? What benchmarks will be used to track students' progress? How will the cohort based course proceed from one stage to another?

It's important to ask some difficult questions before you flag off the learning journey. Unless you know where and when you want the journey to end, there's no way of measuring if the learning has been effective, or is moving in the right direction.

4. Work on building a supportive community

Peer interaction is at the heart of cohort-based learning. Teams will need you to initiate and facilitate the process.

The first thing you want to perfect and review is your training processes. In particular, look for areas where you can improve exchange of insights and feedback. For some activities, the trainer may need to divide the entire community into smaller groups for better accountability. Other activities may need the entire community to work as a cohesive whole.

Your goal should be to engage students to the level that the trainer's role smoothly transitions into one of a facilitator - and sometimes that of a mere observer.

Best practices for cohort-based learning

Cohort-based learning: Challenges to manage

Cohort-based courses are about positive transformation through social learning. And social learning is more about cultural change than about anything else. So it’s quite natural that you’ll encounter some challenges along the way. The trick is, of course, to find a way to overcome those challenges and derive the numerous benefits of this learning model.

While each organization may have some unique challenges, the below three challenges to cohort-based learning seem to be the most common:

1. Managing the diversity

Your learners will belong to diverse groups. And as the team size grows, this diversity will pose fresh challenges. How you manage this diversity is what will set the tone for the success.

The best place to start will be to build trust. Trust fosters the faith that can knock down the walls of differences. Make it easier for anyone to reach out to everyone else.

2. Overcoming the status-quo

Your learners may have gotten a little too comfortable with the traditional model. Pulling them out of this comfort zone and introducing new activities won’t always be easy. You will see them falling back to the ‘old style’ ever so often.

Group activity and accountability will work best in overcoming people’s resistance to change. When individuals see how the new model is delivering results, they are much more receptive to altering their learning approaches.

3. Maintaining the pace

It’s easy to embrace cohort-based learning in a hurry and then desert it too soon - just like a teenager embracing a fashion fad. Because it takes some work on everybody’s part, it’s easier to revert back to the traditional method.

To overcome this challenge, you need to publicly exhibit the small wins and keep getting people committed to the next small step. Keeping things small initially will prevent people from getting into the old, default mode.

Building a cohort-based course: Your next steps

At its essence, building a cohort-based course works pretty much the same work as any other course: curriculum, tools, evaluations, and benchmarks. However, the unique interactive nature of this model requires you to factor in additional dimensions, like group activities, peer feedback, and social learning.

Whether it’s higher education or a corporate setting, you want to start small. Run your course through a small group. Keep the deadlines short and first focus on building the non-critical skills. Make notes on how each session - or each lesson - panned out and what could have been different. Simultaneously, explore the platform you’ve chosen. Move ahead once you are confident to work with larger groups.

Remember, cohort-based learning relies on the community to be successful. This is a major departure from conventional courses. So, there are a few hiccups here, and they shouldn’t faze you.

Once you have the stakeholders’ buy-in and have chosen the right platform, you’ll do a good deal better than you have thought.

Cohort-Based Learning: Benefits, Best Practices, and Challenges

Key Takeaways

What is cohort-based learning: Benefits, best practices, and challenges

What is cohort-based learning?

The cohort-based learning experience