Join Us

Join Us (Dynamic Cohorts)

Join Us is a proposal, originating from the December 2013 DataJam, for a dynamic cohorting feature in the edX platform. Join Us would allow students to join a human-scale cohort/group within a MOOC.

Use Cases

• Study Groups
• Project Groups
• Tutorial Groups
• Institutional Flipped Course Cohorts

Cohort Creation

• Student initiated: A student creates a cohort and advertises a joining hashtag to other students either out of band, in a discussion or via a cohort advert.
• Instructor initiated: An instructor creates a set of cohorts by specifying a number of cohort provisioning constraints. TAs may be associated with these cohorts.
• External Instructor/Mentor Initiated: An instructor, not associated with running the MOOC, creates a cohort and gives their students the joining hashtag. One option would be to have a cohort provisioned via LTI. Students can launch the MOOC from a link in their LMS and grades and analytics are sent to the LMS from the MOOC platform.
• Tuition Service: An independent tutor creates and advertised cohort which students must pay to join.

Joining a Cohort

• Students can use a hashtag to join a cohort.
• Students can join an advertised cohort by selecting from the list of advertised cohorts. They must pay to join any paid cohorts.
• Students can be auto-assigned to instructor created cohorts.
• Students accounts can be provisioned with a cohort membership via an LTI launch.

Cohort Functionality

• Student initiated cohorts allow students access to cohort resources, and the cohort student dashboard. If the student cohort opts to share data, the Instructor can view the Instructor Dashboard and can compare the Student Cohort with other cohorts and the course whole.
• All other cohort types allow the cohort leader to see the cohort members individual data in addition to the cohort dashboards.
• Student Initiated and optionally other cohorts allow students to message other members.

Cohort resources

• Cohorts can have their own discussion and wiki.