Cohort-based course
Also called: CBC, cohort course
A course taught to a group who start and finish together on a fixed schedule, usually with live sessions, rather than a recording each student works through alone whenever they like.
The cohort is the point. Everyone is on week three in the same week, so a live session can assume shared context, questions are useful to more than the person asking, and the group itself creates the pressure to keep up that a self-paced course has to manufacture.
The trade-off is capacity: a cohort takes the teacher's time on a schedule, which caps how many can run at once, and it prices accordingly. Most academies end up running both — a self-paced library that sells while they sleep, and cohorts that sell for several times as much.
For example
The same 12 hours of teaching sells two ways. Recorded, it might go for ₹2,000 and run forever with no teacher time. As a six-week cohort with weekly live sessions it might go for ₹15,000 to 25 people — ₹3,75,000 — but it books the teacher for six weeks and cannot be sold again until the next intake opens.
Related terms
- Learning management system (LMS) — Software that hosts course content, enrols students, tracks their progress and records results. It is the system of record for teaching, as opposed to a website that merely sells a course.
- Drip content — Releasing a course's lessons on a schedule instead of all at once — for example one module a week after enrolment, or on fixed calendar dates for a cohort.
- Completion rate — The share of enrolled students who finish a course. It is the honest measure of whether a course works, and it is usually far lower than course pages imply.