Understanding roles in SimChat

SimChat has two broad kinds of people: staff members and users. Each role has different permissions and access.

The model in one line: your role decides what you can do; your cohorts decide who you can do it to.

Staff members

Staff members manage the organisation, create content and review learner activity.

• Owners - full control of the organisation, including billing, plan and all settings
• Administrators - publish and edit any content, see all learner data, manage staff, users, cohorts and settings
• Assistant administrators - create, edit and publish any of your organisation's content, including live scenarios and templates. They never see learner data and cannot manage people, settings or billing
• Cohort leads - an administrator within their cohorts. They author, review and publish content aimed at the cohorts they staff, and see those cohorts' sessions, analytics, learners and invite links. Organisation-wide content is read-only to them
• Authors - create draft scenarios and submit them for review. Authors never publish and never see learner data
• Assessors - review learner sessions and leave feedback for the cohorts they staff, but cannot create or edit content
• Viewers - get the learner experience, practising published scenarios and seeing their own results, on a staff seat. They cannot create content or see other people's data

Every staff role uses one of your plan's staff seats.

Who sees learner data

Owners and administrators see the whole organisation's sessions and analytics under Activity. Cohort leads and assessors see the same pages for their own cohorts, under My cohorts. Authors, assistant administrators and viewers never see other people's learner data.

What an author can see and edit is scoped by cohorts: content they created, content assigned to one of their cohorts, and content that isn't assigned to any cohort. See How staff access to content works.

Which role for which job

• Administrator - runs the SimChat organisation. Publishes scenarios, manages people, sees everything
• Assistant administrator - can edit and publish anything across the organisation, but without access to learner data or people management. Good for a content team that shouldn't see transcripts
• Author - designs scenarios and submits them for review, without seeing learner results. How much an author may do on their own is set by your organisation's author policies
• Cohort lead - a course or module lead who runs their own cohorts independently: authoring, reviewing and publishing for those cohorts, and seeing their learners' results
• Assessor - examiners and instructors who read transcripts and mark sessions for their cohorts, without creating content
• Viewer - a staff member who should experience SimChat exactly as a learner does. Also where to move staff who no longer need a working role, since it keeps them on a staff seat

Users

Users are the learners who practise with your scenarios. They:

• Complete scenarios
• See their own feedback and results
• Cannot edit scenarios
• Cannot see other users' activity
• Have access only to the scenarios and collections permitted by the organisation

Users can belong to cohorts, which decide which restricted scenarios they can see and which staff look after them. See Creating and managing cohorts.

Cohort staff

Authors, cohort leads and assessors can be made staff of a cohort. Their role decides what they can do there:

• Authors write scenarios and collections for the cohort and submit them for review
• Cohort leads do everything an author does, plus review and publish content for the cohort and see its learners' sessions and activity
• Assessors review the cohort's sessions and leave feedback

Staffing a cohort also covers every sub-cohort nested inside it, so adding someone to a programme gives them its courses too. Add staff from the cohort's page under Cohorts, or assign cohorts when you invite someone.

Publishing and review

Authors do not publish directly. They submit a draft for review, and an administrator, assistant administrator or the cohort's lead publishes it or sends it back with feedback.

Live scenarios are edited in place by administrators and assistant administrators. Everyone else uses Propose an update, which goes through the same review. See Submitting scenarios for review and publishing updates.

Who can use meetings

If your organisation has meetings enabled, any active member can send a scenario's AI avatar into a Teams, Google Meet or Zoom call - staff and learners alike.

Two parts of the feature are limited to owners and administrators:

• Scheduling a meeting for a later time, and rescheduling one afterwards
• Seeing the whole organisation's meetings on the Meetings page. Everyone else sees only the meetings they started themselves

See Using an AI avatar in a Teams, Zoom or Google Meet call for how to run one.

Inviting people

Staff members and learners both join through invite links. A staff invite link carries the role new joiners get, and the cohorts they will staff. See Inviting staff members and users.

If your organisation uses single sign-on or LMS integration, staff can also arrive through those systems and wait in a pending approval queue until an administrator assigns them a role. See Single sign-on and LMS integration.

Updated on: 07/09/2026