Anyone who is run a teaching center knows a one-hour workshop, by itself, rarely changes how someone teaches. The format that reliably does is a cohort. But “cohort” covers a wide range of programs, and the design decisions are what separate one that moves practice from one that mostly produces goodwill. Here is the shape that works, from watching a number of them run.
The five things that make it work
Each person works on their own course, this term. Not a hypothetical course, not a course in the abstract. The section they are teaching right now, with the students in it. What gets produced is a changed course, not a certificate. This is the single most important design choice, because it is the difference between “I learned about a tool” and “my course got better this semester,” and only the second produces the sense of progress that carries someone through genuinely hard work.
Each person picks a real teaching problem, in their own words: my online students do not seem to know each other; I spend every Sunday grading and the feedback still is not landing; I lose half the class by week four and do not find out until the midterm. Technology enters as one possible answer to that problem. And sometimes the answer is not technology at all, which the cohort needs to be able to say plainly.
It runs across a term, at a cadence people can sustain. Every two weeks fits faculty schedules better than every week, and it leaves enough time to try something in the live course and come back with what happened. The arc is simple: name the problem, design a change, put it into one unit, watch, adjust, decide whether to extend it next term.
Peer observation is built in from the start. Each participant visits one other participant’s course, in person or in the LMS, and reports back. A colleague’s actual version of what you are attempting is worth more than any demonstration from a facilitator, and the visits build the relationships that carry people through the harder parts of a redesign.
There is a real stipend. Redesigning a unit of a course is work stacked on top of a full teaching load, and a stipend says the institution understands that. It also shapes who applies. Toward people genuinely serious about the redesign. The amount matters less than the fact that it exists.
What it is not
It is not a technology training program with a longer runtime. If the sessions are organized around features, “week three: the gradebook”, it will produce roughly the results of a stretched-out workshop.
It is not drop-in. People who attend intermittently miss the arc entirely. A cohort of eight who finish accomplishes more than twenty who show up occasionally.
Its facilitator needs to be able to talk pedagogy, not just configuration. Sitting with a historian to work out what a discussion is for in a history course is a different skill from explaining how to set one up, and faculty can tell within a single session which one is in the room with them.
What is worth measuring
Two things. And neither is attendance.
Whether the course changed, and whether the change held. Look at participants’ courses the term after the cohort ends. Is the redesigned unit still there? Did they extend it further? That is the real signal. What survived the program, not what happened during it.
Whether feature use moved in a way that maps to the problems people chose. If four participants started with “my students do not know each other” and their courses now have working peer interaction where there was none before, the cohort did its job. Use tied to a named problem is a far stronger measure than an aggregate adoption number.
On the cost
A cohort of eight to twelve faculty, over a term, with a skilled facilitator, real stipends, and the facilitator’s time to visit courses and give individual feedback, is a genuine budget line. And it serves a modest number of people at once.
What it returns is a real change in those people’s courses, and those people becoming the colleagues the next cohort learns from. Run it a few times and you have a growing group of faculty who have rebuilt part of a course and can show someone else how. That is how practice spreads through a university, through people, over time, and it is worth funding as exactly that mechanism.
Charlie Wrightmann is a consultant at Wrightmann Education Technologists. Part of the Learning Platforms series.
References
- Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The Progress Principle. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68