Today, however, educational content is cheap and abundant on YouTube, in newsletters, on blogs, and on social media. People view learning-related content on YouTube 500 million times every day; the free YouTube channel Crash Course, for instance, features instructors with PhDs in everything from physics to organic chemistry.

For many creators, the implications are discouraging: content generation is a losing battle. Traditional social platforms silo off monetization activities from community building; you post your expertise on YouTube or Twitter, then have to pursue other ways — brand partnerships, low-margin merchandise — to actually capitalize on it.

Anyone can access a workout and diet plan, but very few actually stick with it long enough to see results. Similarly, MOOCs — the massively open online courses that were popularized in the 2010s and continue in other modern forms today — offer evergreen, on-demand, recorded videos, often with a defined syllabus program. But their completion rate, as has been widely reported, is just 3 to 6 percent.

This gap between the grand promise of online education and its results has led to the rise of cohort-based courses (CBCs), interactive online courses where a group of students advances through the material together — in “cohorts” — with hands-on, feedback-based learning at the core.

Consumers pay for what’s scarce. And in today’s content-rich world, what is scarce in online learning is community.

One recent study by researchers at MIT found that online courses not only had a dropout rate of about 96 percent over five years, on average, but that the vast majority of MOOC learners never returned after their first year.

altMBA, a cohort-based course that distilled the workplace so-called “soft skills” traditionally taught in a two-year MBA program into a four-week class, we saw a 96 percent completion rate.

While affordable pricing is an undeniable benefit and important for accessibility, the low cost of MOOCs and lack of quality filters can also have a detrimental impact. The prices of most MOOCs are low enough for some to be considered an impulse purchase, which has led to brand degradation and turned off some creators.

Since MOOC content is pre-recorded, it’s one-directional, meaning there’s no opportunity to ask questions in real time. This hinders the format from teaching anything that requires more feedback, discussion, or hands-on practice.

cohort-based courses offer students ways to learn that are active and hands-on.

a 2019 Harvard study, for example, found that students in an introductory physics class scored higher on tests following active learning sessions. Students have to put in more effort through this format; they’ll stumble and make mistakes.

cohort-based courses also bring the network benefits of startup accelerators to a wider market. The value in accelerators isn’t just content, it’s community. Y Combinator alumni cite factors including the network, exposure to new ideas, community, and even access.

Live, bi-directional learning leads to more accountability

In his book Cooperative Learning, the clinical psychologist and professor of psychology Spencer Kagan argues that the single most powerful approach to comprehension and retention is interactive processing, which occurs when “students engage in interaction with partners or teammates over the content.”

Cohort-based courses are inherently about interleaving, giving students a chance to engage in different modalities — breakouts, role-playing, discussions, debates — with the instructor, coaches, and each other.

Community building improves learning outcomes through social features

edX students who collaborated with a fellow student in completing course material scored nearly 3 points higher, on average, than those working solo.

cyclists performed better when around others, concluding that even the “bodily presence of another contestant participating simultaneously in the race serves to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.” (Triplett completed his study 100 years ago; we can see the evidence in the popularity of Peloton’s social-exercise model today.)

The reality for most creators, though, is that monetizing their expertise is really hard, especially if they don’t have existing followings or networks.

traditional social platforms — Instagram, TikTok, Twitter — create a division between the activities intended to monetize and those meant for community building. Creators give away valuable content, but most don’t have the volume needed to make a living from advertising alone.

Research shows even YouTubers with over 1 million monthly viewers earn less than $17,000 a year. This means content creators often have to monetize via other means such as brand partnerships or low-margin merchandise — activities that often detract from community building.

Creators get more leverage with a productized offering: Instead of “feeding the content monster,” CBCs are productized offerings that offer leverage in terms of creator time and effort.

Creators don’t need to develop a course from scratch every time they run a cohort. And the effort to create a cohort-based course is front-loaded: 80 percent of the effort is in building the course, and 20 percent can be in running or updating the course in future cohorts.

YouTuber Ali Abdaal reportedly made approximately $140,000 from three MOOCs over four years compared to the $1.5 million he made in nine months with his cohort-based course.

What fundamentally matters, though, are student engagement and learning outcomes, no matter how they evolve. As cohort-based courses — the mix of live instruction, cohorts of peers, community, accountability, and hands-on active learning — challenge long-held beliefs in traditional online education, they will spark new opportunities for learners and creators alike, redefining what success looks like in online learning.