3 Myth-Busting Concepts For Course Creators
Source: Google images
Now seems like an opportune time to create a cohort-based course.
The challenge is tips on course creation are circulating like fragments of art we can appreciate in their own right—but there’s a lot left to the imagination when it comes to “big picture” course strategy.
I’ve been involved in thirteen cohort-based courses in the past two years—as an instructor or a student—and each was wildly different from the rest. I’ve felt the elation of what works, and the frustration of what doesn’t.
The most profound frustrations stem from three myths course creators believe about cohort-based courses (CBCs):
they have an effective course based on registration and completion rates;
scaling their teaching means lecturing to the masses on Zoom; and
CBCs can become a source of passive income requiring little time and effort to run once created.
Anyone endorsing these myths is drinking the CBC Kool-Aid.
As entrepreneurs and creators, CBCs can accelerate your career, enhance your credibility and generate crazy profits—BUT, in order to reap these rewards, you need to turn these myths on their heads with three vital concepts: legacy, agency, and iteration.
Let’s dive into how you can use these concepts to strategize your course.
Legacy
Myth #1: Thinking “my course is effective based on registration and completion rates.”
There’s a scene in Modern Family where Luke teaches his non-athletic uncle how to play handball. The number one rule? Never close your eyes when you’re on the court. But once the lesson’s over, Luke instructs his uncle to close his eyes. “It’s OK we’re off the court,” he says. When the uncle closes his eyes, Luke violently knocks the water bottle from his hand and screams, “YOU’RE NEVER OFF THE COURT!”
Source: Google images
Think of your teaching in the same way. Your responsibility to your students doesn’t end the minute you drop off your final Zoom call or send your final recap email. At least it shouldn’t if your goal is to make teaching part of your legacy.
Your students become your legacy.
Consider the compounding principle of having students carry your ideas forward. Across industries and geographic borders.
Teaching is like parenting in the professional sense. Your goal is to prime students for life outside of the (virtual) classroom. And if you’re smart about it, you’ll employ learning activities students can apply in their daily lives from the start of the course. So by the end, they’ve built up confidence to be more autonomous in their applications.
But why should you continue to support students once a cohort ends? After all, they got what they paid for, right? You have no obligation to help them beyond the course end date. So why bother?
It comes back to legacy.
Your students often realize the benefits of your course after the course ends. Sometimes weeks, months or years down the line.
Take Shaan Puri’s Power Writing course for example. Someone from the August cohort recently shared how the course paid for itself x1000 now that he’s landed a great job with a great company—all thanks to Shaan’s cold emailing framework. This is three months after the course ended. Which validates courses are primers for an iterative cycle of application and refinement over time. That’s how people master skills and create opportunities—like landing a new job.
Regardless of when it happens, students’ post-cohort success becomes your success. You become part of their story. In the best case scenarios, they’ll credit your course for boosting their career trajectory. They’ll tell their friends and family about it. They’ll write about it online and talk about it on podcasts. All of which add to your legacy and drive traffic to your course.
The key to supporting students beyond the course is prioritizing offboarding as much as onboarding. Offboarding addresses the “what now?” as students leave your course eager to put everything they’ve learned into practice. These elements directly impact students’ perceived value of your course. It’s far too easy for students to walk away and leave everything behind—and thus fail to see results. Your teachings are only as effective as the offboarding measures for students to sustain them.
So at a minimum, make sure your offboarding experience does three things:
1. Repackages materials so they're enjoyable to return to
Make sure summaries of key takeaways are included. This will increase the odds of students internalizing them for long term retention. (Ex. PDF your email recaps and add them as attachments to your core platform so students can easily download everything from one place).
2. Helps shape students’ routines to continue learning
One of the biggest challenges students face post-cohort is sustaining momentum once the course structure’s gone. So in addition to making materials accessible, you should remind students to:
Establish a new routine practice—with a less intense cadence than the course—and to experiment with different routines until they find the right one;
Prioritize feedback and iteration; and
Keep in touch with peers—specifically those they’ve gelled with—and empower them to initiate and participate in working groups.
3. Directs students to potential next steps
Think of where your students are headed. What should their next step be? How can you guide them there or provide a stepping stone?
You can’t anticipate every possible direction students wish to go in, but you should identify the most common one or two. Or in Write of Passage’s case, the top four. Write of Passage consisted of roughly 300 students. Many of whom were keen to continue writing within the community we’d built together. So the team directed traffic in four ways:
Free options:
They hosted several bonus events—including information sessions on how to leverage writing to find a job, and how to join Maven’s Accelerator Course and Building a Second Brain; and
They deployed a new platform—called Geneva—and granted everyone free access so the community would continue to have a home going forward.
Paid options:
They offer a Writing Studio course—at a significantly smaller capacity—for those eager to continue their writing journey in a rigorously structured setting; and
They offer an alumni package—called Accelewrite—for students to access exclusive content, attend sessions with experts and participate in future cohorts.
Students may or may not pursue any one of the options you provide. Maybe they got what they needed and they’re happy to cut ties. That’s not a bad thing. The goal isn’t to hold onto people, it’s to propel them forward.
It can even be as simple as letting your students know where to find you going forward. Whether it’s on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube—you name it.
Legacy comes down to thinking about the tangible and intangible results you want students to achieve. It could be anything from helping them create a body of work to imparting a mental model to help them get traction on their goals.
That becomes your legacy.
And it grows exponentially as students achieve more and more over time.
Don’t buy into the myth of registration and completion rates being indicative of an effective course. It’s so much more than that. You are so much more than that.
Agency
Myth #2: Thinking “scaling my teaching means lecturing to the masses on Zoom.”
There’s a scene in Girl, Interrupted where Angelina Jolie goes to visit Brittany Murphy—who’s supposedly thriving in her “new life” outside of the institution where they met. But within a few minutes, Jolie does a quick assessment and calls Murphy out saying “you changed the scenery, but not the fucking situation.” It’s a powerful observation illustrating our tendencies to be illusioned by optics, while overlooking fundamental problems and opportunities.
Source: Google images
This is precisely what entrepreneurs and creators do when they think all they need to do is cram a bunch of people into a Zoom lecture. They think they’re “teaching at scale”—and in an innovative way—but really they’re just moving the dreadful auditorium format online. In the same vein people glorify webinars by calling them “workshops”.
Actual workshops leverage Zoom—and other tools—to make learning hands-on. CBCs should do the same. Students can’t be primed for application outside the classroom if they’re just chilling on Zoom listening to instructors talk—especially if they’re doing online shopping or god knows what else.
If you want your course to stand out, you need to have agency. Agency to put your personal stamp on your course, and agency to embrace new ways of teaching online.
As entrepreneurs and creators, you should build your course around you—with a bias to action. Use your time on Zoom to run students through exercises, generate feedback, and iterate. Frontload live sessions with pre-recorded lectures or readings so you can get to the meat at the beginning.
Many course creators perceive CBCs as a limiting framework based on a lack of familiarity with them. But look at courses like Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage. They wouldn’t be what they are if the creators hadn’t had the agency to put their personal stamps on their subject matter, while experimenting with new ways of teaching online—ways that prioritize student application rather than just consumption.
It might sound overwhelming to think about new tools and teaching formats in addition to creating your content, but all I’m saying is don’t stifle your ideas with traditional teaching formats. Optimize for experience.
There are three key things to base your vision on—and you should think of them as levers to play with:
1. Student transformation: What are the tangible and intangible results you want your students to achieve?
Ex. Write of Passage students produce five essays, a website and a newsletter (tangible results) and they adopt a practice of writing from conversation (intangible). Other courses can have more or less of either.
2. Schedule (length x intensity): How immersive is the experience?
Ex. Write of Passage runs for five weeks and hosts three live sessions each week. Other courses can be as short as a couple of days or as long as twelve weeks with anywhere from daily to weekly sessions.
3. Scale (student:teacher ratio x feedback system): What quantity and quality of feedback will students benefit from?
Ex. Write of Passage cohorts have roughly 300 students and everyone gets detailed feedback on each assignment. Most courses are a lot smaller but there are others of similar size or larger—which may include co-facilitators, teaching assistants or mentors—so individual feedback can vary dramatically.
Ultimately, your course is a product. So stoke your creative fire to make it authentic.
Have the agency to leverage new online mediums to teach your subject matter in the best possible way.
Be daring. Try stuff. Then iterate.
Don’t limit yourself to lecturing on Zoom.
Iteration
Myth #3: Thinking “I can make my CBC a source of passive income by designing it and running it the same way over and over again.”
Supertramp’s album cover for Crisis? What Crisis? is visual poetry illustrating the chaos that erupts when we turn our backs on something. After all, iteration is vital to any project. Minor issues may seem insignificant in and of themselves but they compound into bigger ones causing mass destruction.
Source: Google images
The biggest myth of all is running a CBC is a form of passive-income. Creating a course with the intention to run it over and over again without iteration is unsuitable for CBCs. You’re guaranteed to crash and burn if that’s your mindset going into this.
Running a course is like running a startup. The first few cohorts are essentially about the search for a repeatable and scalable course model—and during those initial cohorts, you’ll make massive changes. It’s inevitable. You can’t predict how anything will land, so you test and refine. Once you eventually establish a viable CBC model, you can focus on finessing your execution. You’ll still make iterations during each cohort—and certainly from one to the next—but they’ll be significantly smaller than the first few times you run the course.
The good news is with each iteration comes exponential growth. From the initial pilot through the first few cohorts, you’ll be amazed at the adrenaline and excitement of building such a unique product.
When you’re focused on legacy and empowered by agency, iterations are something you’ll look forward to. Iterations breed momentum. And the iterative process becomes second-nature—so don’t fear it as “more work”. The initial course design is the heaviest lift, and your life gets easier as you generate more and more clarity on how to serve your students.
Just remember the number one rule of customer discovery: don’t get someone else to do it for you. A lot of people jump into course creator mode and bring in additional facilitators and mentors before they’ve validated how best to serve their students. And I get it. People anticipate a lot of work and think adding resources is the way to go. But it’s the equivalent of a founder bringing in salespeople rather than doing customer discovery themselves.
As an entrepreneur or creator, you’re a builder by nature. So build your course with the same intention you would anything else. Think of how you normally generate feedback. Leverage your existing mechanisms.
During your first few cohorts, you should prioritize 1:1 interviews. Again, customer discovery 101. You don’t have to interview all of your students. Just select a representative sample pool. Qualitative information is key and surveys don’t capture the nuance of live conversations.
Some additional food for thought: consider complementing individual feedback—like surveys—with group feedback depending on the size of your group. For example, if you have roughly 25 students, consider having a group debrief. This helps generate additional insights individuals might overlook in feedback surveys and 1:1 interviews. And always request a Net Promoter Score (NPS)—a 0-10 ranking of how likely a student is to recommend your course to others—along with a follow up question as to why a student picked said score. This is important as word of mouth is one of the biggest drivers of course marketing. So you especially want to iterate until you achieve a desirable NPS.
Employ startup tactics to facilitate the iteration process. Leverage your existing feedback mechanisms and continuously work at improving your product.
A CBC is anything but a source of passive income.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, by now you understand CBCs are flexible formats for building authentic learning experiences. And to determine what tactical tips best serve you, you should determine your vision and course strategy.
Don’t get caught drinking the CBC Kool-Aid.
Everything I’ve covered here is meant to be food for thought. Means to get you thinking expansively about what’s possible at such an exciting time for online learning.
I want to empower you to see CBCs as vehicles to drive your legacy.
Agency and iteration are the key and the gas pedal.
The destination is yours to discover.
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