Are Cohort-Based Courses the Future of E-learning?
What we learned with 34 Elements academy
E-learning was supposed to be a revolution. However, completion rates have been dismal. Between 2013 and 2018 completion rates for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have declined to reach a concerning 3% to 6% in 2018.
Let’s investigate how we ended up in this situation and what lies ahead.
Learning has always been connected with teachers, the classic one-to-one interaction. A teacher would pass on his/her knowledge to an apprentice. Teaching was first class but did not scale well.
So we invented schools and universities, where a teacher could gather a large group of individuals and create a generic program to teach at scale.
Then the digital age came in. We first leveraged digital platforms as a way to augment teachers. Teachers could share documents, videos, with a larger group.
That worked quite well to a point where we decided that the human touch, the teacher, was no longer necessary. That was e-learning. It started with top universities namely Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. They converted their written content into digital and shared it with the world. The MOOCs were born.
