• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, October 7, 2022

My company recently celebrated four years in business.

We deliver learning experiences: programs for executives, directors and leaders to navigate disruption and uncertainty. To create these experiences, we draw on a group of what I’d call “rock-star” faculty.

At the same time, the model has a built-in limitation. As soon as the value is tied to being in the room with the rock star, we’ve created both geographic and temporal choke points.

Basically, if you want to participate, you have to be in the appointed room at the appointed time.

Those choke points make it way harder for the business to scale. The faculty are essentially the product, and the expertise that makes them valuable also make them reasonably non-fungible.

We can resolve the geographical choke point by going online. Thanks to Zoom, Teams, Hopin, and the like, it’s a simple matter to run a virtual event for attendees from all over the world.

But the temporal choke point remains: you have to be online at the time of the event in order to participate.

No problem, Kaila, you may be thinking, Just go fully on-demand. Prerecord everything. People can participate anytime, anywhere.

Seems obvious. And yet, when we do go fully on-demand, engagement rates drop off a cliff. Completion rates drop off a cliff. Impact drops off a cliff. When we’re fully on-demand, there’s no urgency. If you can participate anytime, anywhere, why would you participate now?

So what’s the future of online education? It’s cohort-based courses.

A cohort-based course, or CBC, has a fixed start and end date -- none of this anytime, anywhere malarkey. Participants are part of a group -- a cohort. So there’s both urgency and social proof attached.

We’ve already held one program that was a CBC, but it required both me and the participants to be on the call at a certain time every day. It was still limited by a temporal choke point.

But the magic thing about CBCs is that they don’t have to be live. We can run a program that has a fixed start and end date, with pre-recorded modules that drop at specific times.

For a product like that to work, we have to shift our mindset. Instead of the value of the program coming from the opportunity to be in the room with the rock star, it comes from the shared experience with the rest of your cohort -- people who are as excited about learning this thing as you are.

Imagine, for example, that you were both a rabid “Game of Thrones” fan and an aspiring costume designer. Imagine you got sneak preview access to episodes of “House of the Dragon,” plus videos of the costume designers sharing their thinking and approach, plus exercises to work through so you can start to put the insights into practice.

Imagine you’re working through that material and those exercises at the same time as a group of equally rabid “GoT” fans / costume designers, all discussing the content in an online community like Slack. Sure, you can watch the videos whenever you want -- but you want to watch them ASAP, because that’s when everyone is talking about them.

This is the future of online education: one that lowers barriers to participation while still creating extraordinary shared experiences. I’m super-excited about it. How about you?