A cohort-based course is a type of course or educational program in which a group of students, known as a cohort, progresses through the program together.
The cohort typically starts & ends the program at the same time, and the students in the cohort take all of their classes together. This approach allows for a sense of community and camaraderie to develop among the students, as well as great opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, motivation & accountability.
The problem is that MOST people set them up in a way that minimizes the profit potential of their students, allowing their students to lose momentum, and drift away once the course is over.
Here's our best practice recommendation for how to set up your cohort course with the greatest backend upside potential.
- First, set up your cohort-based course that releases content according to a date & time schedule that works for you and your sudents.
- Second, duplicate your cohort-based course into a new course, and set all of the training content to be available immediately. You could call this new course something like "ORIGINAL COURSE NAME Alumni".
- Next, at the end of your cohort-based course, create an experience that uses the "Add to Course" action that adds your cohort of students INTO the new "Alumni" course (which contains all the same content that they just went through), and use the "Remove from Course" action to remove your students from the original cohort course.
- Naturally, make sure you warn them that this is going to happen before it happens! For example:
Now that our cohort experience has come to its end, we need to prepare this course for its new incoming students! So with that in mind, we'll be adding you to a new 'Alumni' version of the course which contains the same content, along with some brand new bonuses that we'll add over time to keep helping you out!" - For your new, incoming cohort, simply change your original cohort content release dates to new dates & times. (Coming soon we'll have an automatic way to update your course release schedule), but until then, you'll need to do it manually, but it shouldn't take too long.
By doing it this way, there are some MASSIVE benefits to you:
- Depending on how many cohorts you run, your "Alumni" version of the course is going to accumulate all of those students over time.
- In your "Alumni" version of the course, you're able to create a great experience for those students which reflects the course they took with you, and even include new bonus content appropriate just for those students which can keep them coming back to that Alumni course over time.
- You can customize the course pages to invite them to special events, webinars, and make special offers... and even add extra bonus content and special offers to that course to upsell them into higher priced programs and services.
- An inside the Commumity Forum, you can create a group JUST for your cohort students. Never forget that when you do cohort-based training, your students often form DEEP bonds and friendships which can last a lifetime. So don't send them away when they're done when you can easily keep them in your world!
- You could even create a paid monthly subscription community for your alums if that makes sense.
- And last, you could award badges to the most active participants from the original course and even enlist a few to jump back in to the cohort course to help out in the community forum as cheerleaders/ambassadors. Everybody loves special VIP status!
Think of your Alumni course as a way you can continue selling to your graduates from within Xperiencify, in a way you could NEVER do otherwise.
