Section · 6 guides
Delivery: live or asynchronous, cohort rhythm, feedback that scales, and the week where half the group disappears.
Delivering a course online is a different craft from delivering one in a room. The signals a teacher relies on are gone, silence is ambiguous, and a learner who is struggling simply stops appearing.
This section deals with the mechanics of running a group at a distance: the first session, the rhythm that keeps people attached, and what to do in the week when attendance falls off a cliff.
Live sessions create accountability and exclude people. Asynchronous includes everyone and abandons them. Most courses need a specific mixture.
Remote teams face a similar visibility problem; remote employee monitoring software shows how one class of tools approaches activity measurement outside a shared workplace.
For wider context on technology and learning, UNESCO publishes public resources on digital education.
Read the guideA cohort is not a list of people who bought the same thing at the same time. Making it a group is deliberate work.
Read the guideLearners form a judgement about whether a course is for them within the first hour, and it is very difficult to revise afterwards.
Read the guideSilence in a course community is usually a design outcome, not a personality trait of the people in it.
Read the guideIndividual feedback is the highest-value thing a course offers and the first thing that breaks as numbers grow.
Read the guideAttrition is not evenly spread. It concentrates in a predictable window, which means it can be planned for.
Read the guide