Articles on: Managing users, staff and access

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 and assessors who run it

Cohorts are useful for:

Organising learners by 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. By default, all users who join your organisation can access all published scenarios.

Creating a cohort

Go to Cohorts in the sidebar
Select Create cohort
Name your cohort (e.g. "Cohort 2026") and add an optional description
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 and assessors who run the cohort (see below)

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 Linked cohort, so learners who join through the link are added automatically
Manage an individual learner's cohorts from Users → All users using Manage cohorts

Adding staff to a cohort

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

Authors can create scenarios for the cohort and review its learners' sessions
Assessors can review the cohort's sessions and leave feedback, but cannot create content

To add staff:

Open the cohort under Cohorts
In the Staff section, select Add staff
Choose the author or assessor to add

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

You can also assign cohorts at invite time: staff invite links have a Staff of cohorts option, so new authors and assessors arrive already attached to the right cohorts. See Inviting staff members and users.

Using cohorts for access control

Cohorts are how you restrict learner access. In the scenario creator Key details step, set Who can access this scenario? to Specific cohorts and choose the cohorts that can access it.

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

The cohort page lists the scenarios and collections assigned to it, so you can check at a glance what a cohort's learners will see.

See Previewing, publishing and managing scenarios for more information.

Restricting a cohort to assigned scenarios only

When you create or edit a cohort, you can turn on Restrict to assigned scenarios only.

Normally, learners see scenarios that are available to everyone in your organisation, as well as any scenarios assigned to their cohorts. When this setting is on, users in the cohort only see the scenarios and collections assigned to their cohorts - scenarios available to all users are hidden from them.

This is useful for focused sessions where you want learners to see only a specific set of scenarios.

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 curricula. 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 - 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. SimChat explains this when you confirm the deletion.

Updated on: 11/07/2026

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