Creating and managing cohorts

Cohorts help you organise your people and control access to scenarios and collections.

A cohort brings together:

Users - the learners who belong to it, for example "2026 intake"
Staff - the authors, cohort leads and assessors who run it

Cohorts are useful for:

Organising learners by college, programme, year, course, module or placement
Restricting scenarios and collections to selected cohorts
Letting a tutor or team run their own cohort - its learners, content and activity - without organisation-wide admin access

Setting up cohorts is optional for small organisations. By default, all users who join your organisation can access all published scenarios, and learner invite links work without a cohort.

Creating a cohort

Go to Cohorts in the sidebar
Select Create cohort
Name your cohort, for example "Cohort 2026", and add an optional description
Optionally choose a Parent cohort to nest it inside another cohort
Save the cohort

After creating a cohort, you can:

Add learners with Add users on the cohort's page
Create an invite link under Users → Invites that automatically adds learners to this cohort
Restrict specific scenarios and collections to this cohort
Add staff - the authors, cohort leads and assessors who run the cohort

Nesting cohorts (sub-cohorts)

Cohorts can be nested up to three levels deep - for example College → Programme → Course. Set the Parent cohort when you create or edit a cohort, or open a parent and use Create sub-cohort on its Sub-cohorts tab.

Nesting changes three things:

Staff cover the whole tree. Staff of a parent cohort have access to every cohort nested beneath it. Sub-cohort pages list them under Also accessible to
Content flows down. Learners in a sub-cohort can access content assigned to any cohort above them. Content assigned to a sub-cohort is not visible to the parent's other learners
Counts and filters roll up. A cohort's user count includes its sub-cohorts, and filtering by a cohort on the Users, Sessions, Exports and Coverage pages includes everything nested inside it

A cohort with sub-cohorts can't be deleted until they are moved or deleted. Existing cohorts are unaffected by nesting - a cohort without a parent behaves exactly as it did before.

Archiving a cohort detaches it from the tree, so its sub-cohorts and the staff inheritance that ran through it stop applying. Move sub-cohorts to a new parent first if they should carry on.

Adding users to a cohort

Open the cohort from Cohorts and select Add users to choose from your organisation's learners. The cohort page lists its users, and you can remove someone at any time - they stay in your organisation, they just leave the cohort.

You can also:

Create an invite link under Users → Invites with this cohort as its Cohort, so learners who join through the link are added automatically
Manage an individual learner's cohorts from Users → All users using Manage cohorts
Add many learners at once: on Users → All users, filter (for example to No cohort), tick the learners, then use Add to cohort
Remove many learners at once: on the cohort's Users tab, tick the learners and use Remove from cohort

Learners in a sub-cohort count as members of every cohort above it for content access, but are only listed directly in the cohort they were placed in.

Adding staff to a cohort

Cohort staff are the authors, cohort leads and assessors who look after the cohort:

Authors create scenarios and collections for the cohort and submit them for review. They never see learner data
Cohort leads do everything an author does, plus review and publish content for the cohort, and see its learners' sessions, activity and invite links
Assessors can review the cohort's sessions and leave feedback, but cannot create content

To add staff:

Open the cohort under Cohorts
On the Staff tab, select Add staff
Choose the person to add

The person must already be an author, cohort lead or assessor in your organisation. Staff can run more than one cohort, and their access is limited to the cohorts they staff plus everything nested beneath them. Owners, administrators and assistant administrators always see everything, so they don't need to be added to cohorts.

Cohort staff can browse the cohorts they staff, and their sub-cohorts, from My cohorts in the sidebar. They see the tree, each cohort's staff and - for roles with learner-data access - its learners, but only administrators add or remove people.

You can also assign cohorts at invite time: a staff invite link lets you pick the cohorts a new author, cohort lead or assessor will staff. Cohort leads must always be given at least one. See Inviting staff members and users.

Using cohorts for access control

Cohorts are how you restrict learner access. In the scenario editor's Key details step, set Who can access this scenario? to Specific cohorts and choose the cohorts that can access it. You can also change this later with Manage access on the scenario list.

You can restrict a collection to specific cohorts in the same way, which controls who can see the collection itself.

The cohort page has Scenarios and Collections tabs listing what is assigned to that cohort, drafts included, so you can check what its learners will see.

These tabs show only what is assigned directly to this cohort. Learners in a sub-cohort also get everything assigned to the cohorts above them, which won't appear here - check the parent's tabs for those.

See Previewing, publishing and managing scenarios for more.

Showing learners only their assigned content

Normally, learners see scenarios that are available to everyone in your organisation, as well as any scenarios assigned to their cohorts.

To show learners only what has been assigned to their cohorts, turn on Only show assigned content under Organisation settings → Policies. This is an organisation-wide setting and replaces the old per-cohort "Restrict to assigned scenarios only" option. Content available to everyone is then hidden unless it sits inside a collection assigned to the learner's cohorts.

This is useful when each cohort should see a curated set of scenarios and nothing else. See How staff access to content works.

Exporting a cohort

Use Export cohort on the cohort's page to download a workbook of its users and staff. Sub-cohort learners and inherited staff are included, with a column saying which cohort each row comes from.

Cohorts and curriculum coverage

When you create or edit a cohort, you can link it to one or more curricula. Coverage reports for the cohort then focus on those. See Tracking curriculum coverage.

Linked LMS courses

If your organisation uses LMS (LTI) integration, you can link a cohort to one or more of your LMS courses when creating or editing it. Learners who launch SimChat from a linked course are enrolled into the cohort automatically, with no invite links needed. See Single sign-on and LMS integration.

Deleting a cohort

Deleting a cohort does not remove its users or staff from your organisation. Scenarios that were restricted only to that cohort become hidden from learners until you assign them to another cohort or open them up, and collections restricted only to it become accessible to everyone. A cohort with sub-cohorts must have them moved or deleted first. SimChat explains all of this when you confirm the deletion.

Updated on: 08/09/2026

Was this article helpful?

Thank you!