Using Cohorts (Groups)

A cohort is a collection of courses, student users and teacher users, which allows the teacher users access to the server dashboard to view the activity of the student users for the specific courses.

Example Use Cases

  • A health worker supervisor needs to view the course activity for all courses for the health workers they supervise. In this case, set up a cohort with the supervisor as the teacher, the health workers as the students and all the courses.

  • A course mentor needs to view the course activity for all the students in just the courses they are mentoring. In this case, set up a cohort with the mentor as the teacher, all the students and the specific courses they need to mentor.

  • A regional health manager needs to view all the activity for all courses for all the health workers in their region. In this case, set up a cohort with the manager as the teacher, all the courses, and the health workers (students) the manager manages.

How to create/manage cohorts

Cohorts can be created from the Oppia server dashboard (select cohorts in the side menu), however only admin and staff users are able to create cohorts.

Cohorts based on user profile fields

You can set up criteria to add users automatically to a particular cohort, instead of needing to add manually one-by-one, see:

What can teacher view

When a teacher logs into the Oppia dashboard, they will only be able to see the course/user activity for the cohorts they have been assigned as a teacher.

For example, if a cohort has teacher A is the teacher, course 1 and course 2 as courses, and user x and user y as the students, the teacher will only see the activity for those courses for those users. If user z is also participating in course 1, the teacher will not see any of user z’s activity.

Additional info on teacher permissions can be found at: OppiaMobile Server Permissions

Additional notes

  • To assign users (teachers or students) and courses to a cohort, these users and courses need to exist on the server first. I.e. you can’t add users or courses to a cohort in preparation for users registering, or a course being uploaded at a later date.

  • You can add start and end dates to a cohort, however this is just for information purposes (eg a class of 2020, a class of 2021), it doesn’t change the access the teachers or students have to the course.

  • Oppia users can be both teachers and students, for example, they might be a student in one cohort, but be a teacher in another.