Cohort-Based Courses: A Student’s Twist
How students can bring a CBC product to fruition by leveraging professors.
The Shift
One thing I noticed in the pandemic was that people started to become more productive. Whether it was fitness, cooking, or retail investing, people indulged in new undertakings in the name of making the extra minutes go by faster. I, for one, took an EdX class on Python. Now, I’m writing this. When we gained more time as a result of quarantine, we wanted to put ourselves to better use.
Though, one thing was still missing, or more accurately, lacking as a result of the newly imposed physical barriers: exposure to others who thought like us and indulged in our same niches. The pandemic has taught us that social beings like us don’t bode particularly well in isolated settings. After being starved of proper social interactions for about a year and a half, we felt the need to assimilate more than ever.
Cohort-Based Courses
That’s why I think cohort-based courses are going to be very useful. Time has zipped past during this quarantine, and we’re at a stage where we’re awkwardly torn between working from our own homes and commuting to work for, you know, MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY. But, throughout the tumultuous remote work debate, two things remain steadfast: the desire to learn new things to grow professionally, and the need to seek out other people with whom to do said learning.
Cohort-Based Courses (let’s call them CBCs for concision) are exactly that. In a nutshell, they’re online courses taught to a cohort of students by one or more experts. The keyword here is cohort: CBCs are time- and group-bound — taught in specific intervals over the year with different groups of people each interval. This means students must adhere to preplanned schedules and can no longer cruise through courses at their own pace.
This also means that, once you sign yourself up for a CBC, you’ve allotted a specific interval in the year (usually an average of 4 weeks) dedicated to learning with a set of other individuals. You’ve chunked out time to network and learn alongside people with interests like yours. In addition to the obvious social and professional benefits of networking, this feature paves way for better learning through increased accountability and commitment.
Ok, so what?
I can keep talking about the benefits of CBCs, but I can’t say much that hasn’t already been said by Andreesen Horowitz.
What I can say is that, and I say this as a student myself, student founders are uniquely positioned to make their mark on this nascent market. More specifically, I think student founders are at a logistical advantage when it comes to the distribution of a CBC platform were they to found a company around the concept. How? By targetting their professors.
Course-market fit
Currently, well-known CBCs include the ones on Maven, including a UI/UX research course taught by Twitter’s Noam Segal, and a Bitcoin course taught by investor and podcaster Anthony Pompliano (costing $829 and $1,250, respectively).
Huge price tags, I know. But what if, instead of public figures like Pompliano, professors taught CBCs? Professors have side hustles, and teaching a CBC could be one such hustle.
Okay, a trip down memory lane: I was taught accounting at Santa Monica College (SMC) by a very intelligent, extremely caring individual, Victor Trippetti. What was interesting about him was that he taught a class that wasn’t an official part of the accounting curriculum. It was a course on the basics of investing and trading. He did it completely out of his altruistic desire to teach students, not because SMC had required him.
Now, what if he had monetized the course? Had he decided to sell his course to his students, and it was taught on a cohort basis, I would have been an eager buyer. 1) I knew and respected the man and had full faith in his expertise by way of being his student for two semesters, 2) trading and investing was a subject I badly wanted to learn, and 3) I would make friends more easily in a smaller cohort than a big college class.
In an attempt to appeal to the probable, I’m going to go ahead and say I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to enroll in a course taught independently by one of my professors — especially if that course added to and built upon what has been taught in school, and especially if I could make new connections in the field as I went. If my Operations and Logistics professor taught a course on real-life process optimization, and I met people in the cohort with whom I could work together in the future, I would happily enroll.
One of the toughest things about teaching a course online is finding course-market fit. It seems that with professors — individuals whose credibility need not be marketed or established (except for the very rare few) as much as newer instructors would— a good chunk of the legwork has already been done. On the students’ side, the incentives line up quite nicely as well. And thus, we have found course-market fit.
Distribution
Professors teach many students daily. To communicate with their students, they send out emails and/or post announcements on platforms like Blackboard and Canvas. Considering these outlets, it wouldn’t take much to market their CBCs toward their students. For example, a marketing professor can slap a big “By the way, I also teach a course on writing newsletters. If you’re interested, shoot me an email or go to this link to apply” onto their announcements — or even mention it in class. No fancy digital ad campaigns. Just pure (kinda) organic marketing.
From that point on, distribution could look something like this: Build up the professor side of the market and the student side should follow suit. Back this up with a polished product with a clean and intuitive interface, and retention should take care of itself.
If I seem like I’m being too optimistic, it’s because I am. The above strategy relies too heavily on students lending full credence to their professors, but not all professors are made equal (hence, this page). So I admit, this strategy may work better in universities with more well-known professors.
But let’s briefly entertain the proposed strategy. At USC, there are 7,400 faculty members (20% are tenured, 37% non-tenured, and 41% are adjunct). Let’s assume the target market of our hypothetical student-led CBC (let’s call it Virtuos) are the non-tenured and adjunct faculty (41%+37% = 78%). This would amount to 5,750 faculty members (~78% of 7,400). If Virtuos captures at least 30% of the 5,750 faculty in one year, it would have 1,725 faculty on its platform, each teaching unique courses that tackle subjects outside of the mandates of USC’s curriculum.
Let’s now assume conservatively that each of the 1,725 faculty members are able to sell their course 5 times a year. Let’s also assume conservatively that their courses go for an average of $150 (much cheaper than what’s found on Maven!). An average of 10 students per cohort seems realistic. Finally, let’s assume Virtuos’ business model rakes 15% of each course sold. Roughly, the revenue that Virtuos would earn from just USC alone would look like this:
R = 0.15($150 * 10 * 5)(1,725) = $1,940,625.
This is revenue from just one campus. If distribution mimicked that of the early days of Facebook — i.e. Virtuos expands campus by campus — that number would be 5–10X its current value.
Magic could happen
Enough back-of-the-envelope math. That was just a long-winded way of saying that the market opportunity exists. With the continued advent of online learning and with schools teetering on whether to fully go back to in-person learning, I would even go as far as to say there is a strong market pull for CBCs right now. There just isn’t a ubiquitous CBC platform specific to colleges…yet.
The right founder, one with the charisma to convince her professors to use this platform and the enthusiasm and ambition to go beyond the traditionally-offered college coursework, can make this happen.
The current personal, professional, and economic benefits of CBCs have yet to be assessed, but it’s no secret that they’re quite expensive, still. Being taught by high-profile industry thought leaders, I doubt the price figures will decrease anytime soon.
Once we bring CBCs into the more humble, less lofty collegiate environment, though — that’s when the magic could happen.
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I’m Aung Si, a University Partner at Crescent Fund and founder of intoVenture, a venture education platform at USC. I’m passionate about product, education, startups, and private markets. Feel free to reach out to me at aungsi.as99@gmail.com!
Check out the stuff I’ve worked on:
