Education is facing a crossroads. On one hand, traditional education systems, including universities are becoming far too clunky and expensive. On the other, current online systems, like Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCS) are too impersonal lack the incentives that drive motivation from students.
This crisis is also an opportunity for new forms of education to be born, and in fact, Cohort-Based Courses (CBC) are rapidly rising to fulfill this gap as we speak. CBC combines the best of both traditional and online education, providing community as well as independence, flexibility as well as a lower financial investment. For all these reasons and more, we think Cohorts are the future of EdTech and lifelong learning.
What Exactly Is Cohort Education?
Cohort learning is nothing new. In fact, most of your high school and university classes were cohort-based. But when we talk about Cohort-Based Courses we are referring to the fast-growing trend in EdTech of applying many of these traditional learning practices to online and lifelong learning.
Online education has mostly been an individualistic, often even self-paced process, but cohort learning changes all this. In the cohort-based model, you would begin a course along with a group of other people, proceed throughout the entire course at the same pace as them and have considerable interaction with them the entire time. Students also have more interaction with the instructor, who instead of just creating a MOOC and walking away, is actually there leading the progress of the course the entire time.
What Are the Benefits of Cohort Learning?
CBCs bring the element of community back into lifelong learning and the online education environment (EdTech). While this may sound nice but not very relevant to student success, the opposite is true. Working with a team engages online learners in ways that are simply impossible in self-based courses, which is why the latter has such a high incompletion rate.
Having both a live instructor and a group of cohorts moving through the coursework with you brings a level of support and assistance to the courses that simply were not there before. And they also provide motivation to complete assignments and research on time, as keeping up with the group and being a strong source of information and guidance yourself makes you a valuable member of the team.
CBCs also open up many more opportunities for fields of study than both traditional classrooms and MOOCs. Not only can University-level courses be done cohort style, but professionals who want to share their knowledge through skillshare-type programs will find a more effective means of signing up more interested students if they try out the cohort model.
Finally, CBCs offer flexibility both in terms of scheduling and finances. While cohorts are in constant contact, this is done through a messaging system, much like social media, so that replies and comments can be returned the same day when you have time. The easy-to-set-up online format means that expensive classrooms rentals and university fees that drive up overhead can be dismissed by instructors with the saving then passed on to students.
Is Cohort Learning the Future?
Several things are coalescing into a landscape that looks perfect for cohort learning to become the preferred form of education, especially for lifelong learners. The first of these is the rise of the remote workplace. With more people working from home, more interest in online education translates into a more fertile environment for EdTech to evolve into more complex and stable forms like CBCs.
Another factor is the decline of effectiveness and satisfaction among students enrolled in traditional education programs. University tuition steadily rises, and so too does student debt along with it. While online cohort-based learning may not completely replace the required in-person courses required for a traditional college degree, it allows students to advance in a parallel environment and offers opportunities for those seeking short-term or certificate-based courses.
In short, CBCs are here to stay. Due to their versability and community-based modeling, they allow both traditional college-style courses and professionals looking to teach on the side an effective means of running live classes simply not available by any other method. Yes indeed, the future belongs to cohorts.
