A lot of the tech tools will be specific to the subject you are teaching. If you’re teaching a CBC on online stock trading, having access to an online trading account is a must for your students.
In addition to infrastructural factors specific to your course, here are 3 main factors to consider while choosing the tech stack for your CBC.
📈 Phase of your CBC
If you’re in the idea / validation phase of CBC, we recommend using free no-code tools that do a ‘good enough’ job to get you started. Prioritise your core value proposition and student outcomes over using more sophisticated tooling.
Once you run a few cohorts and get student feedback you can incorporate more advanced tools as needed. This takes the pressure off you in the beginning, as well as lowers on-boarding time for your students.
👩🎓 Your Student Profile
Go where your audience is. While choosing tools for use-cases like community, go with something that your audience is already familiar with. Avoid wasting time onboarding your students to a completely new tool that they’re unfamiliar with.
If your students are teenagers or web3 enthusiasts, your community tool had better be Discord.
On the other hand, if you expect your audience not to be tech savvy, then go gentle with your range of tools, and choose options like WhatsApp, Telegram or Facebook groups.
Students taking a technology course would need to get familiar with a tool like Slack that is a widely used communication tool in tech companies.
Similarly, make payments, video conferencing and access to content as frictionless as possible.
💰 Your Budget
If you’re a beginner CBC creator validating your CBC idea / market, save your money 💲 and use free no-code tools or freemium products to run the first few cohorts.
Slowly, as you gain momentum, keep adding more feature rich products suitable for your course delivery requirements.
For example, Notion and Google Drive do just fine for your first cohort, but as you scale and start doing more frequent cohorts, it would be a good idea to move your content repositories to a Central Course Hub as mentioned above.