Would Cohort-Based Learning Help Your Students Finish?

UX_curious1997

Hi everyone! 👋 I’m Sara, a UX designer working on a case study focused on Udemy. I’m exploring a cohort-based learning experience as a way to improve student engagement and course completion rates.

Here’s the idea:

Cohort Setup (Your Control): Choose a start & end date, Set section-based milestones, and choose a max number of participants.
Live Q&A: You decide how many sessions you want to host. Each session has a question box where students can submit and upvote questions, giving you a clear, ranked list to answer. No more repeated questions or guessing what matters most.
Student Experience: If they already own the course, they can join a cohort instantly. If not, they purchase the course first, then pick a cohort to join. It’s 100% optional—self-paced learners don’t have to join a cohort at all.

👀 My question for you: Do you think this would help your students complete more of your course? Would this add value or just more work for you?

Feel free to drop a quick “Yes / No” and why, or any thoughts at all. I'd love to include real instructor perspectives in the project.

I’ve added two quick UI mockups below to show how this might work—would love your feedback on them too. Thanks so much!

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Jean-Paul

Hi,

I'll have to give this more thought before I can decide if it's a good idea or not (there are things like timezones to consider). But one thing that springs to mind is "opening" it in advance so that students can post questions early and vote on which ones they want answered. That would give the instructor time to prepare as well as highlighting the questions that are most important to students.

LawrenceMMiller

I currently have a client for which I am doing four two hour sessions for seventy of their employees. Before each session they are all going through one of my focused courses and doing an assignment. When I meet with them on Zoom we discuss the course and assignments. I consider this outside of Udemy. I charged a significant amount of money for these sessions and I don't need Udemy to control this. I am not sure what Udemy's contribution would be.