In Online Ed, Content Is No Longer King—Cohorts Are

To summarize: On many MOOC platforms, the dominant learning modality is passive content consumption; there’s no interaction or real community; and there’s no time constraint. All this amounts to a tiny percentage of learners who actually follow through.

Amid this excess of free content and accessibly priced online learning channels, it’s become nearly impossible for instructors to break out — let alone make a living — off their expertise, as they’ve been told they can. For many creators, the implications are discouraging: content generation is a losing battle. Traditional social platforms silo off... See more

Creators don’t need to develop a course from scratch every time they run a cohort. And the effort to create a cohort-based course is front-loaded: 80 percent of the effort is in building the course, and 20 percent can be in running or updating the course in future cohorts.

We’re in a post-content age...Today, however, educational content is cheap and abundant on YouTube, in newsletters, on blogs, and on social media

Meanwhile, those who are only monetizing via $8/month per subscriber are forever chasing volume and leaving money on the table — not to mention the long-term benefits of community building.

Cohort-based courses provide a compelling way to monetize their expertise directly — and without requiring volume. It may therefore be the next phase of creator monetization, not just for classic educators, as more “knowledge” influencers run cohort-based courses.

Cohort-based courses have a fixed start and end date, enforcing the real-time aspect and creating a scarcity within the abundance of content out there, and are often taught live. It’s the equivalent of participating in a college discussion seminar — taught by an expert in the field, unconstrained by geography or school rank — as opposed to watching... See more