🔮The Quest #22: The Future of Online Learning

Cohort-based Courses, Verbal tools for Facilitation, Creating Online Courses

Hello Friends!

Greetings from Barcelona☀️.

Many thanks for your feedback on the last edition of The Quest and on my new Creativity e-book. A special shout out to the following people: Joan in Mansfield, Monica S., Maria, and Ruth in Barcelona, Maria in Miami, Nadia in Montreal, Jessica and Connie in Toronto, Claudia in London, Michaele and Barry in Bracebridge, Helen in Glasgow, Lux in New Jersey, Adam in Oakland, and Khari in Vancouver 🙌.  

If you are joining The Quest for the first time, welcome to our weekly exploration of creativity, facilitation, and learning.

You can catch up on last week’s edition on procrastination and all past editions here.

🤔As we pass the 1 year anniversary of the pandemic, I am reflecting on how COVID has challenged my assumptions. About pretty much everything. Like online learning. Before the pandemic, I didn’t think it was possible to do any kind of meaningful learning online. I was wrong. Here’s a short article I wrote with 5 lessons that I learned about online learning as a facilitator during the pandemic.

What assumptions has COVID made you challenge?

This week🔎

• Are cohort-based courses the new frontier in online learning?

• Verbal tools for group facilitation

• Creating Online Courses

Let’s dive right in.

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💡The Rise of Cohort-based Courses

An article by online-learning pioneer Tiago Forte about a new wave of online learning called “cohort-based courses” (CBCs). (Attention Canadian friends - it’s not the CBC you know:) Forte gives a fascinating overview of the waves of online learning from MOOCs to Toolkits. The breakthrough of CBCs is the active community that fuels learning and accountability. I wrote about my eye-opening experience with a CBC called Write of Passage here.

Here are a few takeaways from his article:

• The cohort model is not new. This is how most of us have learned - with our peers, with real-time interaction under the guidance of a teacher. But until now this educational format hasn’t been easy to deliver online. Now with Zoom and high-speed internet, it is possible.

• CBCs are highly adaptable. Since everything is virtual and digital it can be adjusted and updated easily. CBCs look more like updates to a software program than a university class.

• CBCs show strong student outcomes. Until now, online courses have had famously low completion rates. Successful CBCs have high completion rates and student satisfaction.

I still have questions about how to ensure accessibility and equity with future waves of online learning. But I do agree with Forte when he says:

…it is very clear that the frontier of innovation has moved, and the model of sitting in front of a computer watching videos by yourself is no longer the best we can do.

And if you really want to geek out on future tendencies in online learning check out these links:

• Andrew Barry, Curious Lion, The Currency of Education is Transformation

• Wes Kao, The Super Specific How: How to Make Your Online Courses More Rigorous (via Julia Saxena’s amazing newsletter)

• Stephen Kosslyn, Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive (book)

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🧰Verbal Tools for Group Facilitation

One of the biggest complaints about online learning is that it isn’t engaging. People get distracted and tune out. That’s why I was happy to come across this Session Lab infographic on verbal tools for group facilitation. These are tried-and-tested facilitation techniques for increasing engagement that work online and in-person. Thank you to the person at Session Lab who had the brilliant idea of laying them all out on one page with cute icons. Session Lab is a paid online workshop tool but I like them because they have tons of free facilitation resources. Check them out here.

Source Session Lab: https://www.sessionlab.com/blog/facilitation-skills/

What are your best tools for engaging participants?

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🚀Creating Online Courses - OnDeck

I am excited to share with you all that I have been accepted into the OnDeck Course Creator Fellowship.

Over the next few months, I’ll be creating an online course on facilitation and learning in the Cohort-based Course model I mentioned above.

I’ll be sharing updates and things I’m learning with you in The Quest and on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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💭Quote of the Week

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. 

Ralph Waldo Emersen

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Thanks for reading The Quest. I always love hearing your feedback and suggestions. Leave a comment below👇or hit reply to share your thoughts and ideas. Visit my website for ways we can work together here. 

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Until next week!

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