Hello Reader,
I have been thinking about a client of mine a lot this week, probably cause I've been in a slower, more reflective kind of headspace and this particular situation keeps coming back to me.
Future Sarah here to warn you that this one got long. There's a lot of instructional design nerdery in the middle and I think it's worth it, but if you're short on time, scroll to the bottom and hit reply with your answer to the question down there.
She had a course. A good one. People had gone through it on their own and gotten real results. Then she decided to open it up as a group program, cause that's what the next chapter looked like for her business
Except the community part didn't really work. The prompt at the end of each module was "share what you learned," and mostly people didn't. The content was big, dense in the best way, but dense, and people were moving through it at completely different speeds, which meant nobody was ever in quite the same place at the same time to actually have a conversation about it.
So then came the logistical spiral. She came to me asking do I drip the content? Release it all at once and let them move at their own pace? How do I even have a group conversation when everyone's in a completely different place? How do I stay on top of all of it without it becoming my entire life cause this was supposed to give me more time not less?
My question back was what's actually in charge here? Is the content the thing, with community kind of orbiting it? Or is the community the thing, and the content is there to support what happens when you're all together live?
Those are two really different programs. Same material, maybe. Completely different design.
It's one of those things that feels like a logistics problem when it's actually a structure problem, and the two require very different solutions. Once she figured out which one was leading, the rest of it got a lot easier to figure out.
For her, community was leading. The content was there to support the conversations, not to be the whole experience. And once that was decided, a lot of decisions that had felt overwhelming started to work themselves out.
From an instructional design standpoint, when community is taking charge, you're working with what adult learning research calls social learning theory. That’s the idea that we learn at a deeper level when we're doing it alongside other people, not just receiving information and going off on our own. The group isn't a bonus feature. It's the actual learning environment.
So that means the course content part has a different job. Instead of being comprehensive, it’s supportive. Short enough that people can move through it before a live session, specific enough that it helps get everyone on the same page, and open-ended enough that it leaves something to talk about during the live session or in chats. You're not trying to cover everything. You're trying to create conditions for a good conversation.
That's a completely different design from a course that happens to also have a community. The content has to carry the full weight of the experience because the discussion might fill in the gaps (if they talk) and there isn’t an expectation that any more learning will happen in the group.
A course-led program has to be thorough cause it's all you've got. A community-led program should be the structure, and the nuanced learning happens in the room, through the questions people ask each other, and the "wait, me too" moments.
Lots of people build their group program content as if it's still a solo course. Dense, comprehensive, and trying to anticipate every question in advance. And then they wonder why nobody's talking. It's not that the content is bad. It's that it already answered everything, so there's nothing left to discuss. Or it’s so much that people get overwhelmed and disappear.
There's also this fancy sounding thing called cognitive load, which is a way of saying the brain can only hold so much at once before it starts dropping things. When you start a group program with a lot of content, you're essentially asking people to climb a steep hill before they even get to the part where they get to be in community with each other. By the time the live session rolls around, they're tired. Or behind. Or both. You can also do the other extreme by not giving them anything to sink their teeth into, so the first live session is filled with crickets because they have nothing to talk about. The key is a nice balance. Spreading the content out, keeping each piece smaller and more focused, means people come to the group with gaps to fill and experiences they want to talk about.
For my client, this meant going back through what she had and asking each piece if this is something people need to understand before we can talk about it together, or if this is something that's better found through conversation. The first category stayed as pre-work. The second category became the live session itself. Because please don’t have live sessions and expect people to fill the time. You need to have something ready to draw out the quiet ones and give some structure. A lot of what had been modules became prompts. Some of what had been lessons became examples she referenced in the room rather than content people consumed beforehand.
Yes, it sounds like a lot of thinking and organizing. But trust me that if you put in that work, your program will be what everyone is talking about because they are getting so much out of it.
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Are you still with me? Big thanks for that! If you scrolled down, here's a quick recap:
Content or community, pick one to lead. And neither is wrong. A content-led program needs to be thorough and comprehensive cause the material has to carry the full thing. A community-led program needs content that fuels conversation rather than replaces it, so people arrive at the live sessions with something to actually talk about and gaps to fill. The problems start when you don't pick one, or when you build a community-led program like it's still a content-led one. That's when nobody's talking, everyone's behind, and you're drowning in logistics, wondering what went wrong. (Social learning theory and cognitive load...I'm fun at parties. 🎉)
If you've got a course you're thinking about moving into a group format (or you've already made that move and something feels off), I'd love to know what's the part that's making you hesitate or that's gotten tangled up in your mind?
Hit me up and let me know.
If you've got a course sitting there and a group program taking shape in your head, and you want to talk through what the redesign actually looks like, a Course Clarity Session is a good place to start. It's 90 minutes, and we'll get into the specifics of your situation, not general advice.
Or if you just want to have a quick conversation first to see if it's even the right fit, grab a free 15-minute call, and we'll figure it out from there.
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Talk soon,
Sarah
Every time you think about creating your course… cue the 😰.
Let’s fix that. My 90-minute Course Clarity Session takes the stress off your plate and turns your ideas into a simple, teachable framework. Plus, I’ll support you before and after so you actually feel excited to move forward. 🤝
Let’s make course creation feel doable (and even fun). Book a Course Clarity Session 👇🙌
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