Hello! After wrapping an eventful cohort 💥 of our course and taking a relaxing break 🧘🏽, we’re back with the best from the world of Cohort Based Courses. Let’s dive right in.

🤩 Imagine this, you’re attending a stellar lecture. The lecturer is explaining a really good framework to solve a particular problem.

😲 The session is riveting. It’s possibly one of the best lectures you’ve attended. Ever.

🤨 Two days pass and you’re noticing a few problems emerge.

It’s been only two days since the lecture, and this realization is dawning upon you.

Everyone struggles with this problem, and it’s been extensively documented by Psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus.

Most teachers make the common mistake of focussing their lecture largely on ‘What’ a particular topic is all about, while briefly touching upon the ‘Why’.

What’s often left for later as home exercise is the ‘How’. Arguably, the ‘How’ is the most important component of learning something new, one that directly deals with; 

❌ What are the common mistakes made while applying?

Many times, teachers will spend a good amount of time focussing on explaining a particular topic, spending very little time with students on the exact steps to effectively apply it.

🤝 Both the above problems can be effectively addressed by using a framework called ‘I Do, You Do, We Do 🤝’, a very effective meta framework that is built using the principles of Active Learning, a topic which we’ve addressed in a previous edition.

As the name ‘I Do, You Do, We Do 🤝’ suggests, the idea is quite simple. we’re detailing it in the next section.

In the spirit of Anne Lamott’s shitty first drafts, we strongly encourage our learners to embrace imperfect and incomplete first drafts and attempt the steps given below.

Note: We’ll use the topic of ‘Learner Outcomes’ to illustrate how we apply the ‘I Do, You Do, We Do 🤝’ framework in the context of our 2 week program on designing Cohort Based Courses.

Example: Right after we introduced the topic of Learner Outcomes, we share the draft of the Learner outcome for our 2 week program with our students. This effectively illustrates how we used best practices to formulate Learner Outcomes ourselves.

Example: We urge our students to open their Course Workbook and write down the shitty first draft of their Learner Outcome statements. All the required resources and examples are provided in the workbook itself. The activity is time-boxed.

Send them to Breakout rooms on Zoom and encourage them to give feedback to each other. Give them pointers on how to give good feedback.

OR

Pick and choose a few students and ask them to share their shitty first drafts. Give them real time detailed feedback on (1) what they did well (2) what and how they can improve upon etc. Do this in the presence of other students so they can observe and learn. Encourage the students to give feedback to each other. Allow the students to iterate in real time based on the feedback you and other students give. That’s the ‘We Do’ bit!

Note: Our method above is a slight modification of the I do We Do You Do framework. The modification is mainly done for two reasons

🏌🏼 To allow learners to DO quicker and with less structure.

🔁 To allow enough time for feedback on what the learner has done.

Thus, we can design Learning Units to allow for one or more iterations of learning to occur. 

Demonstration of the entire loop in class is a powerful device. It demystifies the process of learning for the student. It equips them to go out of class and continue to iterate on their learning. 

We’ve come up with a workbook with exercises and illustrative examples for the ‘I Do, You Do, We Do 🤝’ and many other useful Active Learning frameworks for online courses.

If you’d like to get early access to a workbook at a deeply discounted price, reply to this email saying ‘Interested’ and we’ll send you an exclusive link.

The exercises in the workbook can help you write the Shitty First Drafts to start incorporating Active Learning in your course.