Federal Grant Management
Signature Course No. 418 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Federal Grant Management course, in the Leadership & Management category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Stewardship, honestly run — the money is not yours; the duty is. A federal grant is not a gift with paperwork attached. It is public money handed to your organization for a stated public purpose, under written conditions, with the government's right to look at your records, question your costs, and take money back. This course teaches that stewardship end to end — and its capstones certify the narrower, more useful thing a course honestly can: that you can run an award whose file lets a stranger reconstruct every decision two years later and reach the same conclusion.
It starts with the map. The Uniform Guidance is 2 CFR Part 200 — six subparts in the award's life order, from definitions to audit. You will learn to locate before you opine: name the subpart, the section, and the neighboring subpart you ruled out, and say why — because a team that shares a map argues about answers instead of about where answers live.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Read the Award, Run the Money Honestly — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Mid-Year Stewardship Review; then, Module 2 — Prove It, Report It, Close It Clean — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Closeout and Single Audit File.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a mid-year stewardship review of Velmarra Community Health Alliance's awards that an executive director could act on: control sheets rebuilt from the notices, the quarter's hard charges judged, allocations and indirect recovery recomputed with check lines, and the system tested transaction by transaction; and a closeout and Single Audit readiness packet an auditor could open without finding a surprise the file itself did not already name.
The honesty standard is part of the course. This book is information, not legal advice and not accounting advice: it teaches the structure of the Uniform Guidance and the judgment a grant manager uses inside it, and it flags every figure that rulemaking can change — thresholds, rates, deadlines — to be verified against the current source before you rely on it. In federal grant work, checking the current figure is the professional move.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Federal Grant Management is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
Already enrolled? Enter the course →
Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the Uniform Guidance map. A colleague asks whether your organization may charge a particular celebration dinner to an award — which subpart do you open first, and which second, and why in that order; your award notice contains a term stricter than the general Guidance provision on the same subject — which governs your conduct, and what would you do if you believed the stricter term was a mistake; think of the last stewardship question your office answered from memory or habit — where on the map does it actually live, and how would you verify the answer from the current text today. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Mid-Year Stewardship Review for Module 1 and The Closeout and Single Audit File for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Judge before you charge, and let the file be the proof. Every skill in this course is the same discipline at a different depth: locate the rule before you act, judge the cost before it is charged — allowable, allocable, reasonable, consistently treated, adequately documented — and document the decision at the time it is made, because a decision reconstructed later, under worse conditions, convinces no one.
Module 1 reads the award and runs the money honestly. The Uniform Guidance Map; The Award Is the Obligation; Allowable; Allocable; Reasonable, and Treated Consistently; Period, Budget, and Prior Approvals; Cost Allocation in Practice; Indirect Costs and the Rate; and Financial Management Systems — the steward's foundation: the map, the notice, the cost gates, and the system that makes all of it provable.
Module 2 proves it, reports it, and closes it clean. Procurement Under the Award; Subrecipients and Contractors; Property, Equipment, and Records; Reporting; Cash, Cost Share, and Program Income; Amendments, Extensions, and Budget Revisions; When Something Goes Wrong; Single Audit Readiness; and Closeout — Module 1 under pressure, with dates attached: deadlines, other organizations, and auditors.
And it holds its boundary throughout. This course begins the morning after the celebration, when a federal award has arrived: it teaches post-award stewardship only — not proposal writing or fundraising, which Signature Course No. 282 teaches, and not selling to the government under procurement contracts, which No. 417 treats from the seller's seat.
What you will learn
- Navigate the Uniform Guidance by its structure and find the rule that governs a live question
- Read an award notice as obligations — period, budget, terms, and approvals — before money moves
- Judge costs as allowable, allocable, and reasonable, and treat like costs consistently
- Allocate shared costs and compute indirect costs on the correct base, with arithmetic that recomputes
- Run the financial management, procurement, subrecipient, property, and records duties of an award
- Report truthfully, draw cash lawfully, document cost share, and handle program income correctly
- Manage changes, noncompliance, Single Audit readiness, and closeout so the award ends clean
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Federal Grant Management, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Mid-Year Stewardship Review and The Closeout and Single Audit File
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people who answer for public money
Grant managers and administrators — at nonprofits, universities, local agencies, and Tribal organizations — who run federal awards day to day and sign, file, or approve the documents the audit will later read; and finance staff and controllers who keep the accounts the awards live in, allocate shared costs, compute indirect costs, and prepare the schedule an auditor will test.
Program directors — who spend award money on real work and need to know which of their spending decisions are theirs to make and which need written approval first.
Executive directors and board-facing leaders — who are accountable for the whole portfolio and need to ask the right stewardship questions before an auditor asks them first; and pass-through staff at state agencies and larger nonprofits that subaward federal money and carry monitoring duties they cannot delegate away. This course assumes you work, or are about to work, inside an organization that holds at least one federal award or subaward, and that you can read a budget and a bank-style ledger; it assumes no law degree and no accounting credential, and it does not try to make you a lawyer or an auditor.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Uniform Guidance Map
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Federal Grant Management is Signature Course No. 418. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.