A Review of Write of Passage
This is an excerpt from my newsletter on May 26, 2022. I was a student in Cohort 7 and returned as a mentor in Cohort 8.
Online Courses 101
Online courses have existed for a decade. The idea is simple: secure the best instructor, create great content, and make the course available to thousands of people. Quality goes up and cost per student goes down. Today, you can pay $10 to learn how to code or speak in public.
But online courses have limitations. Students complain about lecture fatigue. Student-to-student interactions and student-teacher interactions are minimal. As a result, self-paced online course completion rates are low.
There's a new form of online learning, and it's the cohort-based course (CBC).
Write of Passage - Cohort 7
Write of Passage
I signed up last September for Write of Passage, a 5-week CBC teaching you to write online. At $4,000, it's the gold standard and it attracts a highly-educated crowd.
The course promises to students who do the work, a personal website, five essays, and a newsletter.
Students receive 10X more, but they don't know it yet.
A week before the course starts, students create an online profile to introduce themselves in a private online community. They watch a few videos in advance. Many interact with one another.
First Live Class
In the first live session, 300 people from 35 countries log into Zoom. David Perell, the course founder, starts talking about why people want to write online:
Ability to exchange ideas across the globe
Channel one's ambitions, e.g. create digital products or services
Attract like-minded people by writing in public
But then something very different happens. David stops the lecture, and asks students why they signed up? He's doesn't want a few students to raise their hand and answer the question. He wants each person to share their answer in a casual conversation.
Breakout rooms
Will Mannon, David's course director who co-hosts, creates 100 breakout rooms of 3-people each. For the next 10 minutes, three strangers share their motivations. Some give confident answers. Some share information never voiced before. Others will feel too vulnerable to give more than the standard answer.
Over the five-week course, there will be many breakout sessions where strangers-at-first, becoming friends, exchange ideas around prompts.
It's an endless supply of short conversations with very smart, motivated, and interesting people.
Writing as revelation
The real magic comes from the writing. For five weeks, each week students receive a writing prompt. They post their draft in a private online community where it awaits peer feedback.
The course teaches students how to give and receive very specific, multi-dimensional, and always honest feedback. Big egos take a hit. Writers lacking confidence discover fans. The feedback changes your perception of yourself.
Students rewrite the essays, and the last step is to publish to a personal website for the world to see. Any self-conscious student will agonize for hours before hitting publish. I agonized for weeks unsure why I was doing it and speculating about potential downstream consequences.
Eventually, most publish their imperfect writing on their imperfect personal website. And this tiny step is the most critical moment on the journey of becoming an online writer.
Mentor sessions
Do you remember your professor directing you to the teaching assistant when you needed help? Mentors are that and more.
A dozen mentors hold weekly sessions covering a range of related tactical topics. Directly or indirectly, mentors help students overcome mental obstacles and understand their why for writing. And there are breakout sessions.
And in the background are another dozen stewards holding together other aspects of the course and community.
A Community of Writers
By the end of the five weeks, the course has transformed a large group of total strangers into a trusted, supportive community. The friendships and helping spirit forged during the intense five weeks continue beyond the course via the private community software, Zoom, and in a few cases, in-person meetings.
Several of my cohort mates are good friends at this point. I have never met any of them in person.
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One of those friends is Alexandra Allen whose image I borrowed above. She’s an expert in CBC design, and shared her observations about Write of Passage here: 10 Gold Standards Of Premier Cohort-Based Learning: How To Level Up Your Course Like Write of Passage
