Learning first, community second: The juicy challenges of building course communities
Communities are a focal point of cohort-based courses (CBCs). You can't have a start and end date, and just expect a high completion rate. You need community to help students stay motivated and stick through learning hard things.
So how is community building different for CBCs vs other types of organizations? What unique challenges do courses bring?
By understanding the nuances facing community managers, you’ll build a stronger community for your own course, gain a newfound appreciation for the hard work community managers do, and evaluate the right hire when growing your team.
1. Build trust among students quickly because courses don’t last forever.
Cohort-based courses have a start and end date. This sense of urgency (from a deadline) is exactly what most of us need to get our shit together and focus. But, the time bound element means you can't build community with a slow burn. Like a Michael Bay movie where cars are blowing up in the first three minutes, there needs to be action right away. For a 2 week course, if students are feeling disengaged or alone 1 week in... 50% of the course is already over. Yikes.
You need to help students trust each other, quickly and deeply, to get the full benefits of a CBC. Building camaraderie between students empowers them to:
Give feedback with generosity
Receive feedback without being defensive
Have shared culture re: "what it's like around here"
Community managers facilitate trust-building, but it's not easy. Students often arrive with walls up. They’re eager but probably skeptical, like most of us when we encounter a new environment. So course creators and community managers have to earn the students’ trust first, then help students trust each other as peers.
2. Culture can be intangible and implicit, but it develops quickly and is hard to change.
The first few days of a course are incredibly important. Actually, it’s probably fair to say even BEFORE your course starts--and definitely by day one--students already have judged your course. This sounds extreme but is normal. You make snap judgments about the products and services you encounter, so it’s reasonable that your students are picking up on conscious and subconscious clues about what your community is like.
If you let negativity go unchecked, it will fester.
If you let a disgruntled student whisper to other students, the discontent could grow into a small mob.
If you let a student get away with saying something inappropriate, all the students will see, “This is how things are around here. This is who gets rewarded. This is what’s considered okay.”
Writing community guidelines isn’t enough. You have to enforce and celebrate the behavior you want to see. And even with written and unwritten rules… There are a hundred different ways to say the same thing. Some courses have a tough love culture. Others are more supportive. Some courses have a “there’s no wrong answer” approach, while others believe there certainly is a right answer and students are here because they want to learn the right way.
3. Communities reveal themselves over time, so there’s only so much you can do to prepare.
You must form hypotheses about what to do and have an arsenal of tactics ready, but stay flexible based on how students react.
Like a subreddit, each course can have a totally different culture. As a course community manager, you need to give enough space for students to co-create and let the community reveal itself. There’s always an element of the unknown. No matter how well you plan, you won’t know what direction it will take or what chemistry will happen when students first come together.
So prepare to offer students enough structure that they’re not twiddling their thumbs wondering what to do. But stay alert and notice clues for what students are actually reacting to. In my experience, you’ll always be a little surprised. I find myself saying, “Hmm, I didn’t think they’d like this so much. We should do more of this” or “Hmm I thought they’d really like this, but they’re not really reacting the way I expected. Maybe we’ll remove this.”
This tension can be hard to navigate but nailing it will allow you to systematically improve your course and foster community.
4. Handle a wide range of student personas and course topics.
Another layer of complexity community managers face is working across multiple courses. They have to create communities *within* the course and *across* courses. For example, let's say you have courses on topics like design, writing, and investing. The chances that a course community manager has experience (or interest) in all three is very slim.
They’ll need to manage students with a range of personas, values, and psychographics. You can’t “copy and paste” from one course community to the other. The tactics that work for writing students might not work for angel investing students. From a content perspective, they’ll have to build community--without necessarily being a subject matter expert themselves. This can feel jarring and it requires a whole new level of empathy for students.
5. Learning first, community second.
Community without learning is hanging out with friends. For example, meetup groups, networking, fellowships, or social gatherings. But course communities have to be about camaraderie AND enable learning at the same time. This is an important distinction because it’s a higher bar to hit both of those criteria.
Real learning often challenges us--and makes us feel a little insecure. This can bring out the worst in students; for example, it can bring out defensiveness, aggressive debating, or a demanding attitude with peers/TAs/the instructor. People lash out when they’re afraid.
When done right, though, cohort-based communities are like nothing else. Think about the times you’ve gone through the fire and emerged on the other side. You’re bonded for life. It’s no accident that fraternities have their pledges go through challenging acts together, that the Army makes new soldiers go through grueling basic training, that sports teams are often really close friends that trust each other deeply. Transformative experiences challenge you mentally or physically. And cohort-based courses are often that experience for many operators and practitioners who are sharpening their skills alongside peers.
So you have to design ways for students to interact, open up, share, analyze, and teach each other--so they build friendship with students and end the course with a transformative learning outcome.
PS I’ve made most of my career decisions by asking myself, “Are these interesting problems I would like to solve and am uniquely suited to solve?” If you think the above are interesting challenges you’re eager to tackle, I’m currently hiring for a Community Lead. Community is a driving force behind the effectiveness of cohort-based courses, and you'll be leading this critical component of the business. Also, you’ll get to work day to day with yours truly. :] Read more about the role and apply here.
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