What is a lead cohort?

We offer educational courses on AI safety and biosecurity. These courses use cohort-based learning: where we group 5-8 participants into a cohort, and pair them with an expert facilitator. On most of our courses, cohorts meet weekly for discussion sessions where they go through activities based on the readings and exercises they do independently.

A lead cohort is a cohort that goes through a course slightly ahead of everyone else. We usually schedule them about a week in advance of the rest of the cohorts. These cohorts act as beta testers for the resources, exercises and discussion activities before they're rolled out to all students.

This means feedback from lead cohorts in particularly helpful! You can provide this either via our regular feedback channels (such as in the Course Hub or at the bottom of session plans), or directly to course staff.

We usually also record lead cohort discussion sessions, solely for the purpose of making improvements to our delivery of the course (for example, we might change an activity if we see that an activity is confusing, doesn’t seem very engaging, or isn’t hitting learning objectives). These recordings are only accessible to BlueDot core staff members, and are deleted after the course. We also detail some of our security measures for protecting your data in our privacy policy. You’ll be explicitly told if we want to record your discussions ahead of time, and if this is a problem can either object or switch into a non-lead cohort.