Articles on: Creating scenarios

Previewing, publishing and managing scenarios

A scenario is either a draft or published. Drafts are only visible to staff. Publishing makes a scenario available to your learners. This article explains how to preview, publish, edit and manage your scenarios.

Draft and published scenarios

On the Scenarios page, each scenario shows its status:

Draft - work in progress, visible only to staff
Published - available to learners (subject to access control)

You can keep a scenario in draft for as long as you like while you build and test it.

Previewing a scenario

Preview scenario appears in the header after you have saved the scenario at least once (Save draft).

Select Preview scenario to try the conversation exactly as a learner would, so you can check how the AI character performs before publishing.

Publishing and unpublishing

When you are editing a scenario:

Select Save draft to save your progress without publishing
Select Publish to make the scenario available to learners
Select Update to save changes to a scenario that is already published
Select Unpublish to return a published scenario to draft and hide it from learners

Before you can publish, you must choose who can access the scenario (see below). If you haven't, SimChat will ask you to make a choice first.

Owners and administrators can publish anything. Authors who staff a cohort can publish scenarios for their own cohorts. Other authors save drafts for an administrator to review and publish.

Editing a scenario

Open a scenario from the Scenarios page to edit it. Work through the steps and select Update (for published scenarios) or Save draft (for drafts) to save your changes.

Imported library scenarios cannot be edited, but you can still organise them and control access. See Using scenario libraries and importing scenarios.

Choosing who can access a scenario

Every scenario has a visibility setting, and you must choose it before you can publish.

In the Key details step, under Who can access this scenario?, choose one of:

All users in this organisation - all learners can access the scenario
Specific cohorts - then select the cohorts that can access it

If you choose Specific cohorts, you need to select at least one cohort. If you don't have any cohorts yet, administrators can create one without leaving the page.

You can change visibility at any time in Key details or from the Scenarios list using Manage access.

Learners who are not in the permitted cohorts will not see the scenario. See Creating and managing cohorts.

Organising scenarios

From the Scenarios page you can also:

Start a scenario yourself
Add to collection to group related scenarios. Collections help you organise scenarios; they don't control who can access them. Access is always set on the scenario itself. See Organising scenarios using collections.

Deleting a scenario

To delete a scenario, open it for editing and select the trash icon, then confirm with Delete. Deleting a scenario is permanent. Consider unpublishing instead if you only want to hide it temporarily.

Updated on: 11/07/2026

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