Running one cohort from start to finish
Say you teach a six-week course to twenty people who all start on the same Monday. On Maven, the platform is built for exactly that. Its own site describes cohort-based courses, one-day workshops and free short lessons, with Zoom and calendar integration, automatic scheduling and reminders, and email marketing around enrolment.
In Learnomy you build the material first, as an ordinary course. Then the Pro cohorts extension wraps a group around it: a title, a start date, an end date and an optional seat limit. The status moves from open to in progress to completed on its own as the dates pass. Members reach it through their account, and the instructor manages it from a front-end screen without opening the admin area.
The part Learnomy does not do is the room itself. A cohort has no video, no webinar tool and no calendar of its own. We checked, and it is not hidden somewhere in a setting.
Where the live sessions happen
A Learnomy course can contain live-session lessons. You paste a Zoom, Meet or Teams link, set a start time and a length, and students see a countdown, then a Join button for the session window. The call itself opens in the tool you already pay for.
That works well for a handful of sessions a cohort. It works less well if you teach every day, want recordings handled for you, or want a platform to schedule across time zones. Maven describes tooling for all of that, and it is the main reason to pick it.
What a cohort does for the group
Between sessions, the extension does the chasing you would otherwise do by hand.
- Reminders go out as a cohort is about to start, has started, is about to end and has ended, in the app and by email.
- Members who fall behind get a nudge, measured from the day they joined, so a late joiner is not nagged on day one.
- A roster shows each member’s progress, and a leaderboard appears in My Account.
- If a companion community plugin attaches a private room, the cohort page links to it.
Content Drip, also Pro, can release lessons on dates or a set number of days after enrolment. Assignments and a weighted gradebook with CSV export are Pro as well, which suits a cohort with homework.
Selling seats and keeping your alumni
Seats are sold through the course’s checkout. The buyer pays by card through Stripe or through PayPal, coupons handle early-bird pricing, and the money goes to your processor account with no platform share. Maven describes Stripe-based payments, including company invoices; check its pricing and terms for how it takes its part.
When a run ends, the people in it remain accounts in your WordPress database with their progress, quiz results and certificates. You can enrol the same group into an advanced course or a membership with a pasted list, and export students as CSV at any time. On a hosted marketplace, ask what you can contact and export before you build a following there.
The first week and the cost of running it
A cohort member in Learnomy gets an email when the cohort is about to start, then finds the course, the cohort and their progress in one account area. The first week is quiet unless you fill it: an announcement, a live-session lesson with a Join button, and the first lesson open. Nothing pulls them into a shared lobby, because a cohort is a schedule and a roster, not a space.
Hosting, updates and backups are yours. The cohort setup itself takes minutes once the course exists, but the first run deserves a rehearsal with two or three friendly testers. A person who can install a WordPress plugin can do all of it. A person who wants to avoid every technical choice will be happier on a hosted platform.
Who should not switch
Stay on Maven if live teaching is the product and you want its room, its scheduling and its reminders handled in one place. Stay if you want a platform that may also surface your course to new buyers. Learnomy has no marketplace, so every student comes from your own audience.
Moving a course across
Maven has no importer into Learnomy. The material is rebuilt by hand, or scripted against the REST API or WP-CLI if there is a lot of it.
- Export whatever Maven allows you to keep, and check what you may reuse.
- Rebuild the course and its quizzes in Learnomy Free.
- Add Pro and create a cohort with dates and a seat limit.
- Add live-session lessons with your call links.
- Test the reminders by creating a cohort that starts tomorrow.
- Bulk enrol only the people you are allowed to contact.