BLOC Podcast

49: Cohort-Based Learning in Eduflow with William Cronje

May 03, 2022 Episode 49
BLOC Podcast
49: Cohort-Based Learning in Eduflow with William Cronje
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, I chat with my dear friend, William Cronje, about the cohort-based learning experiences, social learning, and William's career journey that led him to leading a cohort of 800 instructional designers from all over the world!

As an instructional designer and program manager at Eduflow Academy, William Cronje is the co-creator of the popular "Instructional Design Principles for Course Creation" cohort-based course. With over five years of experience creating online and blended learning experiences, William is a proud geek who is always eager to learn more about learning. His most recent fixation is finding ways to tap into the social energy of a learning community with the goal of finding ways to make online learning more engaging and valuable.

Eduflow Academy: https://www.eduflow.com/academy
Instructional Design Principles for Course Creation: https://www.eduflow.com/academy/instructional-design-principles-for-course-creation
William on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-cronje-95847729/
William on Twitter: https://twitter.com/williamcronje 

William's suggestion for those who want to learn more about instructional design principles for course creation (outside of the Eduflow Academy course):

Connect with Heidi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidiekirby/ or on my website: www.heidikirby.com

Thanks for listening to the BLOC!

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidiekirby/

Or check out what I'm working on over at https://www.getusefulstuff.com/

William Cronje:

Creating an online learning experience, you're creating the conditions, you're creating the environment in which learning is most likely to happen. There's no way to force anyone to do anything.

Heidi Kirby:

Hello, friends, and welcome to the block the building learning and organizational culture podcast. I'm your host, Heidi Kirby. And on today's episode, I have the pleasure of chatting with my dear friend, William Cronje about his role as instructional designer and program manager at edu flow, overseeing edu flow Academy, which you may have heard of, if you're on LinkedIn at all, really. And we've talked about cohort based learning experiences, social learning, instructional design, and more. You're not going to want to miss this one. Hey, well, how are you?

William Cronje:

I'm good. It's such a pleasure to finally be on the podcast. I've always wanted to be on a podcast. And this is my first time. So I'm very excited.

Heidi Kirby:

I love it. I'm so happy to have you. Let's jump right in. Why don't you tell me a little bit about you, your career journey, how you ended up where you are today. And any fun facts you want to share?

William Cronje:

Yeah, I have a weird, very weird journey. So I started in more than a multimedia space. So I have a multimedia background, and then a bachelor's in arts and I did journalism. And then I went into interactive media. And then kind of like, from there, I went into studying marketing. And while I was in the marketing college, I was asked to become a lecturer. We are taught multimedia stuff. And and they're they're kind of got the bug for, for teaching and learning. Or, yeah, and it's been it's been really cool. And while I was studying there, I got, I did some internships at elearning places. And I finally started working at a company called to you South African, kind of like branch off to you, which was get smarter, and get smarter partners with big universities all over the world. And they create executive level Online Short Courses. So for the better half of three years, I spent a lot of time working with subject matter experts and putting together really awesome learning experiences with some really cool people. And that was an amazing, incredible learning experience. I mean, the people who I worked with there were exceptionally talented. And then from there, I just randomly saw this post on Facebook for an ad to or job ad for ad flow. And I thought I'd throw my my name in the hat. And I was very lucky to to get a to get a position. And yeah, it's it's been incredible. So as you flow, I'm an instructional designer and program manager. And I run what is called ag flow Academy. So it is a kind of like a separate entity that kind of like focuses on instructional design and learning and development. And we try to create as many free and affordable low barrier learning experiences that are collaborative and fun. And, yeah, just want to try to enrich the learning and development community as much as possible and to learn as much as we can from from the space. Yeah, I think that's like a very brief introduction. But I also was very lucky to have grown up. So my dad is both my parents academics in the space of education. So I was kind of like, thrown into that academic, academic environment. They taught me a lot about, you know, like, our dinner conversations that night would not be How was your day? Or, you know, how's the meal? Did you hear about this nice study about x y Zed? So I kind of got the academic bug back then. And that's why I'm so interested in learning theory. And also, I know this is going all over the place, but I also started my master's and like halfway I finished the quarter from losses just need to do the dissertation, but which have been postponed for a year and a half.

Heidi Kirby:

I hear that. I feel

William Cronje:

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's, that's about it.

Heidi Kirby:

Cool, awesome. No, I think that's great. And can you just give me a brief overview of what edu flow? Regular is in case our listeners don't know?

William Cronje:

So you flow is a learning management system that At focuses on creating social and collaborative learning experiences. So we have a very popular feature called peer reviews. So we make it very, very simple to firstly create a course and then to add all the learners and then to create a peer review environment. But the I definitely recommend that everyone checks out the flow, there's, you can sign up for a free plan and start creating your own courses in a few minutes. And that's really an amazing part of audit. Yeah, so social learning all the way is edgy flow.

Heidi Kirby:

Love it. I love it. So then as you flow came first and then Edie flow Academy. So how did that how did that idea and kind of like the the origin story, if you will of Edie flow Academy.

William Cronje:

So I wish I could take credit for ag flow Academy, but the CEO of of ag flow started at flow Academy before I got there. And then I was when I joined, my job was to kind of like, take over not take over, but to what's it called nurture you flow Academy. And before I started, we had a bunch of self paced courses. And then David and I were having a social get together. And we did the one thing we're not supposed to do in a social get together. And we actually started talking about work. And I suggested, you know, how about we create cohort based course. It's very trendy at the moment. And I think ad flow academies, or edgy flows features are perfect for cohort based learning experience. So then, a few months later, we launched our first instructional design principles, cohort based course. And that turned out to be very popular. And from there, we got to know Luke Hobbs, and we got to know you and other people like Eric Yankers. And we also got to know other amazing people in the instructional design community, this has been an incredible way to, to, you know, just meet some amazing people and learn from from the community as we go.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, absolutely. And what's so striking to me is that it's so global, right? Like, yeah, there are people from all over the world who sign up for the eddy flow Academy, instructional design, for course, creation. Oh, I'm sorry, instructional design principles, for course, creation cohorts, and like, of all different experience levels to, right, like, I've shadowed those courses. And I've seen the intros from different people that are like, Oh, I'm not even in instructional design yet. But I want to be or I've been in it for 20 years, but it's time for a refresher. And it's time to meet like, the new talent in ID and what they're doing and keeping up with, like, the trends and issues and things like that. So yeah, I think it's really, really neat to just see what not only like, what instructional design is, like in other countries, but also like, what are their trends? Like, what's trending for them that maybe isn't trending in the US? Right?

William Cronje:

Yeah, yeah, we've got a stat for you. The most recent cohort and record before, I think we had over 70 Different countries represented. It's incredible. And you're right, we get a lot of incredibly unique perspective. And the amazing thing is when we when we, you know, do say the analysis phase, when we talk about the analysis phase, people from so I'm from South Africa, and we have to talk a lot about access, not just internet bandwidth problems, you know, how, how do you overcome these basic barriers to create your learning experience? So seeing the unique, unique solutions that people come up with, depending on where they're from? It's also incredibly valuable. And like you said, the variety of experience so we've got teachers transitioning, who are sharing the same learning experience as the absolute veterans in the field, who, who, you know, you can't teach them anything, but they still want to they still want to be part of the journey and they're so valuable to the learning experience because they you know, the experience and knowledge that they add in the discussions and stuff is exceptional.

Heidi Kirby:

Totally So does it make you nervous when you've got like one of those like, industry veteran, facilitate because I know I do a workshop every cohort On scenario based learning, and sometimes the people I see I'm like, Oh my gosh, like, there's nothing I can teach them. Like, I get kind of nervous. I'm like, What are they gonna think? You know?

William Cronje:

Yeah, I said the first the, when we launched the first cohort, in, I think it was like October last year, I was, my nerves were broken, because, you know, like, we just developed the learning material. And we were about to invite a bunch of people with PhDs and director titles, you know, like, they were going to be our first cohort. And it was, like a very good idea to invite them, because, firstly, they could data testimonials after the course were incredibly valuable in terms of getting other people to trust the journey. But the feedback that they gave us was exceptional. I mean, we got so many great ideas. And since we're now on, about to start the sixth cohort, we have six generations of sometimes hundreds of people who give feedback and say, you know, why don't you take this and that and that and combine these things? And why don't you add a module about this? So nowadays, I'm very confident in the material we're presenting. Because, in effect, it's been validated and kind of like, co created by all of these field. It's, I like to think of myself as a co creator in the course, because every cohort has contributed to creating or improving the course for the next cohort early.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah. So you mentioned hundreds of people. And so the most recent cohort had how many?

William Cronje:

We enrolled? I think 800 People in the cohort. Yeah. And then we did 50. So it scaled a

Heidi Kirby:

lot. Yes, definitely. I want to talk about scalability in a minute. But first, I want to ask, when you've got that much feedback? How do you get through it? Or how do you prioritize? How do you decide like, what you're going to, you know, implement and what you're going to, you know, say, Oh, hey, thanks, but not this time? Yeah.

William Cronje:

So we've got a bunch of different spots where we include feedback. So we've got, I guess, you can call them pulse surveys, I guess, where we're at the end of every week, we asked them, What did you enjoy this week? What was you know, really good? And what can we fix? What will how can we improve, and that I look at every single entry into into those forms, or into that form. And it helps me to quickly, you know, like, use like a bit of an Eisenhower matrix, where if something is urgent and important, you take that you take care of that quickly. If if something is, you know, not urgent and not important, you kind of shelve, that, it might be a nice feature. And then you also look at how long it will take you to to, you know, implement something that that they suggest. Then we also have a course evaluation survey. At the end of the course, I think the previous one got like 140 submissions. So, there we ask things like that loosely based on the Kirkpatrick model. So I'll ask a few questions here. And then based on on some of the levels, and yeah, it some of them are like sliding scale questions, you know, like, how much did this type of activity help you. And then they can also include a written response. And from that, if I see that, you know, 10, people said that the analysis phase in week one was too much it was too hectic, then I know that something has to happen. We have to fix something. And we have to reduce that amount of load to make it a bit more manageable for the next cohort. And then because we can use kind of an iterative approach, because we, you know, go code by cohort by cohort, I can test something for cohort three, and then get some feedback. And I can in the course evaluation survey, put a question in to say, you know, I've implemented this thing, what is your experience of it? Do you think we should continue using it for the next cohort? And that kind of like, you know, iterative action research, I guess, you could say has been super useful and it you know it for the peer feedback process, for example. So I don't know if you had a question about this it but so the the way we able to scale it is because we've got a peer feedback approach. So the facilitator He's done great every single. It's not it's not feasible for, and we can't give as valuable feedback as peers. So we iterated the kind of like process of encouraging feedback literacy. So we started with just like some basic guides, second, you know, give some feedback here and there based on this rubric, and then we find out that if you model good feedback, so if you give an example of good feedback and say, okay, you've read this, that shows this is a good example of feedback now give your own feedback to this participant. And, you know, we can keep that up. And eventually, we've gotten to a space where the, the ratio of people who have a bad experience from the peer feedback process versus those who have a really positive experience, it's, you know, it, it, how can I say this? It outweighs the, you know, the good experience completely outweighs your experiences? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Hope that makes sense.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. And it's interesting, because do you remember MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses? And like how they had their like, little, very brief shining moment, right? Like, I was just grabbing a statistic, and it said that they like, they had a lower than 15% completion rate, typically. And I think part of that was the fact that like, many of them were completely asynchronous, right? So like, you could sign up for it. Like, you could sign up for anything online and forget about it. Right? So what is different about the cohort based approach? Like what makes that unique? And like, what are what are completion rates for like, the edu flow code.

William Cronje:

So I'll start with the completion rates. And I want to start with a caveat about completion rates. Because completion rates you like arguably have pretty, they're not very reliable, you can say, you can compare completion rate from one type, of course, to another type, of course, because, you know, like the way people come in and the way you know, like, it's a free course, I'm still quite proud of our completion rate. So of the people who start the course, or if people start the first activity in the course, if they enroll in the show, you know, like if we pick up activity and activity, one, all the way through to completing the course, we have about a 50% completion rate. That's really good. Yeah, yeah, I think it's really good. And the completion rate has been going up. And my theory, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that. So we went from cohort, two, which was around 60 people to code three, which was 400 people, I was expecting to see a massive drop in the completion rates. Sure. And we didn't we saw, like a 8% drop in completion rates. So we were able to scale, you know, to scalar code base course, without introducing 200 facilitators, we're going to great work by using just pretty simple mechanics, and I guess this iterative design approach. So yeah, I think I only answered half of your question from earlier.

Heidi Kirby:

Like, what what's special about Cohort Based Learning?

William Cronje:

I think I'm still trying to think it's so popular,

Heidi Kirby:

right?

William Cronje:

Yeah. I think it's popular. They've always been popular. A gold based courses are not a new thing. Yeah, the place I used to work at a tea, you get smarter. They've been creating code base courses for the I think the better half of 10 years. But code base courses became really, really popular because of what's the the course that kind of launched it into the mainstream, alt MBA? So the alt MBA was like, thing that started this, this this phrase cohort based course, as an online learning experience. And I think what's what's what makes them important, like really popular as I can say four things. So the the first the first thing is presence. In a social learning experience, you feel like you're present with other people. There are other people who share the same kind of learning journey. They have similar goals, that they can be there with you. And when I think about prisons, I think about, you know, like, you can also be present with other people who are doing the same Wordle as you pray Since creates a community, right? It doesn't create a community, it is like one of the things that lose people. The next thing is accountability. So, in, you know, LinkedIn doesn't hold you accountable for completing the course. But if you if you post on LinkedIn, or if you post on an introduction in circle, or whatever to say, like I'm joining this learning journey with you, they kind of hold you accountable, where you, it's another like motivational factor, that that helps you to get there. And you know that what you do will also influence someone else's learning and journey. The next one is inclusion, in terms of like, you know, it, because of the, especially if you improve, kind of like, representation and accessibility and stuff, you can bring in a lot of people, and you can have a lot of diversity and a cohort, which I find extremely special. And then the final thing is reliance. Nice, God based course, of course, based experience, makes you feel like you're relying on other people to cross the line. And other people feel like they rely on you. It's this, Johnson and Johnson call this cooperative learning. You know, it's the four things I mentioned earlier, were all all redefinitions of principles of cooperative learning, but it's it's a cooperation, we're working together to learn and to enrich our learning journey. And yeah, I think those four elements are pretty, pretty special. And that's why they they make Kobe's learning experiences. So, so fun, that it's not everything. I'm sure there's a lot of other reasons why people do it. But I think these are four big drivers.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, no, I think that that's great. And I think that they're, they're seeing a moment right there trending right now. Like I keep hearing some form of the word cohort, and then insert random other words afterwards, right. And I think part of that has to do with just the pandemic, right, and like, everyone being alone, or quarantined or working from home, when they're used to working with a team, or, you know, being out of work suddenly, and not having a team or, you know, whatever the situation is, like, people want to have those experiences and be with other people and work with other people. But something that I think has been positive coming out of COVID is the ability to, like, connect with like, I was just watching an old episode of the show fringe. I don't know if you're used

William Cronje:

to that, well, yes.

Heidi Kirby:

But we've just been going through it, and there was an episode where they were like, you know, hey, not only can we find out that what this guy is working on in the lab, but we can see it in real time, because he's gonna call us with video. And they're like, whoa, and I'm like a zoom. Are they talking about zoom? And that I realized, like, Zoom has not been around that long. Yeah. And it's come a long way in the last two years from sheer necessity. But now, instead of like, only being able to connect with people in your, in your work on your team, on your floor at work, right? Like, I worked on, like a five floor building. And like, I couldn't tell you who else worked on the floor isn't mine, right? Like, and so now you can connect with people from all over the world. So not only do you have like this desire to to talk to people, but now you can talk to people from everywhere. And so I think that that's kind of the drive a driving force behind like this cohort based experience.

William Cronje:

Yeah. And I think because because of the pandemic, and I know, like pandemic talk, everyone's over talking about the pandemic, but it you know, we can't, we can't not talk about it. In this. That's called based learning because it's, I think the pandemic is also meant that people are more open to embracing online learning experiences. So, you know, like, where, where they used to be able to say, Okay, well, I'm going to learn about this topic, or rather just sign up for a workshop where I can go in person. And because of the pandemic, you were forced to, to try this out and say, Okay, well, let me let me I have to get these these like, bits of knowledge to improve x y Zed. Let me see if this online learning thing can work for me. And you know, because we were kind of pushed into that direction. A lot of people actually enjoyed it, and they caught the bug. And now they want to do everything cohort based. And do you know, to some extent, there might even be more fun than an in person experience? Yeah.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, absolutely. Because like, would you rather get on a plane travel somewhere have to wear dress clothes, and be locked in a hotel room with other people for eight hours? Or would you rather roll out of bed in your pajamas, hop on the computer, talk to people from multiple different countries be able to go on mute and have your little snack whenever you want? Yeah, you know, and to me, it's a no brainer.

William Cronje:

Exactly. And, you know, if you think about the asynchronous versus synchronous, you know, like a code base course, doesn't have to be completely synchronous, all it, all it needs is to have a start date, and an end date, and people doing the thing together. Which means that, you know, it doesn't have to be a live experience, you can write, you can catch up, if you're the type of person who doesn't like interacting with other people, you can still draw an eye on that social energy of a cohort, without feeling a need to, to, you know, talk to them. You might want to chat and ask questions and stuff. Or you could be like me, who, you know, like, I just, I've drawn the energy, but I don't always feel like I need to, to engage. You know, like, it's sure, you know, the reason why we go to restaurant restaurants in areas that are busy. You don't want to sit in a restaurant that's completely deserted. And you just want to feel part of something, I think.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I think to that, letting at least I was like the facilitator of one of the courses in edu flow Academy, letting everyone who's in the course, talk amongst themselves first, before I add my two cents in is like, it's really it's great to watch. And it's great to see, and it's just really nice to see everybody helping each other out. Yeah. And like, you know, I, I'm on the circle community, and and so I see all the different requests that go out. Because I mean, we're talking, there's got to be over 1000 people in there at this

William Cronje:

point. Yeah. Around 1300. Now,

Heidi Kirby:

okay, yeah. And so, you know, there's all sorts of questions that come through all day, every day. And they get answered,

William Cronje:

Yes, that's fine. That's, that's Yeah, that's really awesome. I love seeing that. And the nice thing about about a code base, you know, code, or like, I guess, just about the way the course is built, is that we are facilitators, we're not lecturers, you know, we have to create an environment where they can support each other. And we don't have to be the ones who do the work. We just have to encourage, and I think that's what your facilitation is all about. And to see that happening, that peer support happening almost automatically is it gives me goosebumps sometimes when I sit back and I say, Okay, well, some of the posts are a question about X, Y Zed, like, I've got this problem, how can I use these? Like, which tools should I use to go into the analysis phase and find the problem, the root of my problem, whatever. And then seeing like, 12 comments where people have like, detailed suggestions on how to do it without me having to jump in and say, Well, why don't you try X Y, Zed? And then the best part is I get to learn from other people's responses as well. I can see okay, so yeah, I think that's you're right. It is really, really cool to see that happening.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, on that note, what would you say is the biggest takeaway in your skills as an instructional designer as a result of kind of building as you flow Academy in general, and the course?

William Cronje:

Like the biggest thing I've learned from from Yeah, oh, my goodness. I think it's about like, the biggest lesson I've learned, I guess, is that creating an online learning experience, you're creating the conditions, you're creating the environment, in which learning is most likely to happen. There's no way to force anyone to do anything. But the only thing we can do is to remove as many barriers as we can. So for example, one of the barriers might have been that people felt like they had to attend something live, but they don't have to attend something live to participate. You can watch the recording, we can transcribe the recording, we can make the recording available to Nick Stay. So it for me, it really reinforced the responsibility of instructional designer, as someone who is creating that environment. And the the the kind of like more well designed environment gets, the less effort you have to put into steering learners because they are more likely to get to somewhere. So for example, if I get the same question over and over and over and over again, so something like, how do you turn off notifications, I can then find out what, like iterating player on collect feedback to find out what the best way is to teach someone how to manage the notifications, and then I can get immediate feedback in the next cohort to see how successful that intervention was. So I've learned to kind of like, almost like try to predict where they would get stuck, and then try to design interventions that would help them to figure things out. And to the point where the amount of queries that come in where people get lost or get stuck as reduced significantly, we get very few questions nowadays. You we do get questions, and we encourage people to ask questions. But yeah, the the idea of collecting feedback and iterating has meant that we've created an environment where there aren't that many barriers, and you know, people can take their own little journeys to get what they want. We, for example, we've also made, we haven't made a compulsory to engage in all the discussions, we've we've said, engage in 50% of discussions do do, like get out of the course what you want out of it. And so that you get people who just want to like do a little bit and learn a little bit here and there, then you get people who want to just, you know, throw themselves into the learning experience and, and just absorb as much as possible, and talk to everyone and like everyone's stuff. And we want to be able to accommodate and facilitate the journey for both of those types of learners.

Heidi Kirby:

I love it. That's great. Awesome. So how would one go about joining a cohort,

William Cronje:

the easiest way to do it is to just go to add photo comm forward slash Academy, and then to click on the little square that says Instructional Design Principles for post creation. And then that's the digital application form. It's completely free to apply. And then we have our next cohort is on 12/20 of May. And the application deadline is on 13th. May. So it's it's just around the corner. We have just wrapped up Goward five. And so this will be code six. And I'm very excited to see how that to see who joins us this time around.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah. And so you have to fill out an application and not everyone gets accepted. Yeah, correct. No, no. So So what tips would you give? And what are you looking for, or what is edenflo? Looking for? Yeah, so who they accept.

William Cronje:

So we have a few criteria. But the two big ones are, some people will fill out a form just like typed up type. And then it doesn't look like it's a lot of effort has gone into it. And it's one of the filters that helps us to figure out whether someone will likely put a lot of effort into the online course. So because we rely on on peer feedback, we have to be careful about how we accept people into the cohort, because we don't want to have a code full of people who don't wouldn't want to add value to the entire experience. So that is the like big thing, we make sure that that people show that they would be committed to the entire learning journey, or the learning experience. And then the other thing is just the to check whether what they want to learn lines up with what the course is about. So sometimes people will will say, Okay, well, I want to learn how to use Articulate Storyline. But it's not a course about how to use authoring tools. There's a whole other conversation about, you know, what is instructional design? And we have that conversation quite a bit in the cohort. Which is really cool, because we go through the whole ADDIE process. And we we talked about how, you know, using authoring tools is a very, very tiny aspect of a very, very broad field.

Heidi Kirby:

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So then my last question for you is the same one I asked all of my guests and it is what What would you recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about instructional design principles? For course creation?

William Cronje:

i Oh, okay. I do you know what, I'm going to recommend a podcast. So great. If you look up Gregg minds on learning podcast, you will find a Donald Clark and John hamre talking about the entire history of learning theory. And the big minds, the big here's the stuff we learned from from, you know, what they've done and what they theorized that is an exceptional resource. If I like if I had to, like, tell any new instructional designer or any instructional designer, if you want, like the fundamentals on what we know about how people learn, and go through that series, it's, it's, it's obviously a great podcast. And then the other one is Donald Clark's blog. We also the stuff he writes is also really, really insightful. And I mean, he's written so many books about instructional design, or he just most recently wrote on about learning experiences. I am a bit of a superfan. But the Yeah, I would say just do that podcast series beginning to end. Awesome, really, really incredible bit of work that they've done.

Heidi Kirby:

Cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I've had a blast chatting with you about all things as you flow.

William Cronje:

Thanks so much for having me. It really was a pleasure. And thank you so much for for inviting me onto my first ever podcast.

Heidi Kirby:

Thanks again for joining me on the blog. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.