I had an opportunity to consult with Co.Lab at a very early stage to work together and figure out a platform to scale their peer based learning model.
Traditionally, schools are hard to scale. They face two problems with scaling:
- Localized. They have limited amount of reach and how far they can go
- Individuals. There is a cap on the number of instructors and students a school can support over time
Co.Lab solved this with their unique peer based learning model. Prior to the course starting, you are assigned a peer group, and a project. The course is faciliated around your “pod” completing the course, and it has great benefits:
- High student accountability
- More collaboration. People love interacting with each other
- Unlocks higher creativity among individuals
- Self correction, and willingness to share
Challenges
As Helen and Sefunmi learned with growing Co.Lab, most of the existing education tools didn’t really support their format for instruction.
There was often a lot manual and background process that made it hard to manage people. Most education tooling today is designed around individual instruction. This is in contrast to Co.Lab’s asynchronous and group based approach.
In fact, as we mapped out the entire chain of actions, and interactions, one area of high friction was using Zoom to facilitate groups.
massive swimlane diagram of everything we figured was happening
The team was manually breaking people into groups and pre-setting times for everyone to meet at the same time. Coordinating was a nightmare.
Product Demo
The final product was a learning management system with built in video-conferencing and collaboration. For example, everyone in a group has to be present to view content. They had to, at the same time, progress to the next step in a lesson.
I was responsible for the tech powering the learning platform.
We used daily.co for videos, yjs for collaboration, and the UI is built with React/Typescript.
Check out the demo by Helen
The platform consisted of a curriculum management, video calling, and group submissions.
Since Co.Lab had been running for a few months now, it was easy to test our new Co.Learn platform with existing set of users. We found that it was sufficient to replace Zoom for us.
And just like that, we built a new way people can learn together.
If you’re looking to break into tech, and upskill your abilities by working with an actual team, you should consider joining the next cohort.