Your course needs a culture

A letter to course creators facing quiet rooms and blank forums

Dear course creator,

I’ve been in your course.

Maybe not literally, but I’ve been in tons of courses like yours. I know how much thought goes into what you’ve built. How long you spent figuring out the right order for the material, how carefully you framed the prompts, how much you want this thing to actually matter.

You care about what you teach and it shows. You’re not just there to deliver a bunch of content. You want your students to truly learn and grow, in a way that stays with them beyond the live calls and PDFs.

Which is why it’s so painful when you open the Zoom call and only a few cameras come on. One person raises their hand. The rest stay in the back of the class for the whole session. And afterwards, it’s crickets on the forum.

You start wondering what you’re doing wrong. Should you mix up the order? Are the exercises unclear? You keep iterating on your curriculum, but something is still missing.

Until you start to doubt yourself.

Maybe my material isn’t strong enough.

Maybe I’m just not the person to teach this.

Maybe this is as good as it gets.

None of that is true.

Your course is strong. The problem isn’t you and it isn’t your content. What’s missing is a piece no one ever told you to design.

By example

When I work with course creators on this exact issue, what I see over and over is that most student silence isn’t disinterest. It’s disorientation.

They’re not disengaged. They don’t know how to engage, because no one has shown them.

Every course is different, and students don’t know what’s expected. It’s up to the creator to make that clear. To show them they have a role besides being a participant.

We assume that if we give them a live session and a forum, they’ll know what to do. But most don’t. Not because they don’t care, but because the kind of participation that creates energy and momentum isn't obvious. It’s learned. Practiced. Modeled.

Learning together needs an example.

When students see what this kind of interaction looks like, and have space to practice it, it becomes part of how the group learns. That’s when the course starts to work the way you meant it to.

It’s not just a few raised hands for technical or admin questions. It’s not everyone quietly waiting their turn to speak, or chiming in with surface-level agreement. It’s students helping each other get unstuck. Asking each other better questions. Offering reflections while someone struggles out loud.

It’s not about the material, it’s about the culture.

The tone, the expectations, the way people respond to each other. Whether it feels normal to speak up, think out loud together, and support each other.

And when that layer is there, students don’t just sit back taking notes. They start using the material, wrestling with it, and making it their own.

Night and day

I worked with a course creator whose work, like yours, I deeply admire. She’d struggled in past cohorts with low energy, in sessions and on the forum. This time, we added just a few things: short materials on how to show up, a shared language for participation, and a space to practice this together.

The shift was immediate and unmistakable.

The sessions were alive. Instead of everything running through the host, people started responding directly to each other. They jumped in more freely, picked up on each other’s ideas. The whole thing felt more like a group conversation than a guided session.

Someone started a new forum thread right after, and it turned into its own self-organized session. The first of many.

Students kept asking about what to do post-cohort, how to stay connected, how to keep going with the work. It wasn’t forced, the group just naturally found their own rhythm. And it came from a few small cues that helped people know how to be there.

Same content. Same teacher. But this time, the course had a culture.

Create your own

If the culture isn’t intentional, it’s invisible.

That’s the piece so many thoughtful creators are missing, not because they’re careless, but because they don’t realize it’s theirs to design and build.

Getting students to engage isn’t about being a more charismatic teacher. It’s not about redesigning your whole course either. It’s about building in a layer that shows students how to show up and helps them get there.

Creating your own course culture is what makes participation feel normal and lets students engage with the material together. It’s what turns a group of students into a learning community, and it’s what allows the course to do what you designed it to do.

Now that you see it, you can start building it.

If you need any help, let me know.

Warmly,

Rik.