Why create a cohort-based course with Disco

How social-first design can boost learning engagement

Social-first design means engineering a platform that merges the needs and wants of businesses and course creator with the needs and wants of their audience. For Disco, this means a few things:

A fully customizable platform

It’s important to maintain brand consistency and continuity. While some learning management systems (LMSs) are branded like their brand, Disco is a chameleon, letting you add your brand’s custom colors, and upload brand logos and images.

What's more, is that you can customize the LMS with your domain, branding visuals, labels, and appearance. This type of extensive customization feature is difficult to find in other learning platforms, yet very critical to learning organizations to strengthen their brand.

This is how you can easily drag-drop and move the blocks to customize and design your Disco home:

Flexible and accessible learning options

People learn differently, and it’s important to accommodate all online learning styles whenever possible; whether you’re one of the 65% of people who learn best through visuals, or you prefer to learn at your own pace, like 58% of people in a LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report.

What’s important is having options for learners to engage with learning content, whether that’s live discussions, recorded events, short quizzes, longer assignments, or a full resource library of content to review at their own time and pace.

Multiple touch points for engagement

The whole point of social learning in online education is that it’s, you know, social. By assigning smaller cohorts, Disco encourages direct and group conversation and discussion to share ideas, resources, and questions. For example, Disco's built-in forum and discussion board are not just any old chat room.

Everyone (and we mean everyone) can post, comment, and share their brilliant insights faster than you can say "Eureka!". But wait, there's more! You can embed multiple apps right into these discussions which is good even for self-paced learning or asynchronous participation in a cohort program.

Want to share a YouTube video? Bam! Need to showcase an Airtable board? Kapow! It's like giving your learners a Swiss Army knife for communication, way way different from traditional education.

Now, hold onto your hats because we're about to dive into the world of polls - Disco style! Forget boring old surveys; Disco's poll option is here to make feedback fun again. Here's the kicker - everyone can see the answers and comment on the post. It's like turning your online course into a live, interactive game show!

But we're not done yet, folks! Here comes the cherry on top: Disco AI is ready to be your poll-creating genie. That's right, you can ask the AI to conjure up poll topics for you. It's like having a brainstorming buddy who never gets tired and always has fresh ideas.

So go ahead, give it a whirl, and watch as your community engagement levels skyrocket faster than a caffeinated squirrel on a rocket ship!

With these tools at your fingertips, your cohort course is about to become more interactive without creating too much course material--this is what you call maximizing user-generated content or in a learning context, 'learner-generated content'.

And the best part? Let's not forget the built-in feature for private and public group chats and DMs perfect for creating collaboration in a self-paced course, and is similar to the Slack feature that differentiates modern learning from traditional education.

Is AI the future of social learning?

These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a SaaS company that doesn’t use Artificial Intelligence or AI. Of course, it’s not so much that you use it, but more how you use it. 

For administrators and course creators, AI can be an important time-saving tool that can totally transform not just your content, but how you create it. Not to mention, it can take a lot of the day-to-day check-ins off your plate, meaning you’ve got more time for that big-picture thinking that only a human can do (that is, for now…).

There are two key ways that AI can help drive social learning.

1. Use AI to drive learner engagement

If you’ve got an entire cohort of actively engaged learners, congratulations: you’ve won the social learning lottery. But more commonly than not, groups have varying levels of engaged learners, and it’s the course leader’s job to ensure everyone is feeling safe and connected, and that they’re receiving value from the content.

Unfortunately, that takes time.

Disco’s AI comes at this problem in two ways:

Administrators can use AI to monitor engagement levels for individuals, tracking the number of comments or posts they create, their event attendance levels, and several modules or assignments created.

They can then set up AI-generated prompts to help connect lagging team members with their peers or team leads by asking them questions, giving them conversation starters to post, or tagging them into active discussions.

This tracking isn’t intended to call people out for not contributing, but instead to help identify those people who may need more support to succeed in the program.

2. Create course content faster with AI 

Creating excellent course content takes a long time—unless you’re using AI like some of the leading learning organizations. Now, we’re certainly not telling you to purely use AI-generated content for your courses—but we’re also absolutely telling you to at least incorporate it. 

Disco’s AI allows you to use AI-generated content as a base and then edit as needed, whether you’re using it to create images to illustrate a point make your content more visually engaging, or to develop quizzes based on your pre-existing content.

Bonus tip: Disco lets you duplicate your content, making it faster and easier to create varying levels of difficulty or personalization for each of your various cohorts or tiers.