Iterating Cohort Based Courses
3 weeks back we at NextLeap kicked-off the third cohort of the Product Designer Fellowship. The fellowship is an 8 week cohort based course - designed to help people transition into this space from different domains. The end goal? Get employed as a digital product designer.
The interesting part? The first and the third cohort look very different from each other. With every cohort, we have tried to double down on things that worked well and iterate on those that didn’t.
As a learning experience designer, my focus has also shifted with every cohort. Here are some things I’ve learnt along with way:
Your learners will evolve
The profile of our learners and their needs have evolved with every cohort. This means as designers, to keep evolving with these changing profiles and making sure the course caters to the learners in that cohort.
Example:
Our third cohort had more working professionals than students. Historically, we knew that managing time for people who are working becomes challenging over 8 weeks. With this cohort, we added more focus on time management, prioritising things happening in the fellowship and clearly marking things mandatory/options to support them. This might seem like not at all connected to what they’re trying to learn, but goes a long way in supporting their learning.
Let outputs direct the curriculum
At NextLeap, we believe in learning by doing. Like all our courses, the Product Designer Fellowship was also designed in a way that learners get a chance to get their hands dirty and create things.
While designing courses, it’s very easy to get into the FOMO game and try to add things that we feel our learners ‘should’ know. Instead, it’s important to focus on what they should be able to do and make changes in the curriculum based on that.
Example:
With the projects produced in our first cohort, we realised that visual design is something that takes time and practice. That led us to change the curriculum and focus more on visual design from the second cohort onwards. We also added an optional 44 day daily UI challenge to help people practice visual design everyday for 44 days. You can check them out here
Problem - Intervention - Measurement
Taking a problem solving lens to learning experience design is really helpful. We follow the following steps while introducing anything new in the fellowship:
Problem: What issue is the learner facing? What all do we know about it? Why is this a problem?
Intervention: How are we solving this?
Measurement: What is the success criteria? What metrics should this intervention move?
Example:
Problem: Learners mostly come from non-design backgrounds and know very little designers. As a result, they are seeking a community to learn with during the fellowship.
Intervention: Introduce smaller groups in a cohort of learners who can hold each other accountable, meet more often and learn together.
Measurement: Adoption of these small groups, Value add of these groups (self reported)
For any learning experience to be relevant, evolution is key!