Roles and permissions
The four roles
| Role | Console | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Student | Learning | Takes courses. Every account holds this |
| Instructor | Instructor | Teaches and grades |
| Manager | Instructor + Admin | Runs programmes without necessarily teaching |
| Admin | Instructor + Admin | Everything, including people and settings |
A person can hold more than one. Holding a staff role puts a mode switcher at the top of the sidebar, which opens the other consoles in a new tab. No switcher means you hold the instructor role alone, or none.
Roles are per organisation
This is the part worth internalising.
Your role is your role here. It does not follow you to another organisation on the platform, and it is not a property of your account — it is a property of your membership.
Two consequences:
- Being suspended in one organisation does not affect your access to any other.
- An administrator of one organisation has no standing in another, and cannot see into it at all.
What each role can do
Learning
| Student | Instructor | Manager | Admin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Take courses, submit work | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Self-enrol in open courses | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Teaching
| Instructor | Manager | Admin | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create and edit courses | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Import a course | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Publish a course | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Grade submissions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Schedule classes, take registers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Award bonus marks | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Announce to their courses and cohorts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
An instructor sees the courses and cohorts they are attached to. A manager or administrator sees everything in the organisation.
Running the organisation
| Manager | Admin | |
|---|---|---|
| Create cohorts, attach courses | Yes | Yes |
| Assign staff to offerings | Yes | Yes |
| Enrol and bulk-enrol learners | Yes | Yes |
| Manage pathways | Yes | Yes |
| Read and set grading scales | Yes | Yes |
| Invite students and instructors | Yes | Yes |
| Invite admins and managers | No | Yes |
| Suspend, unlock, reactivate, remove members | No | Yes |
| Create and edit roles | Yes | Yes |
| Organisation profile and branding | No | Yes |
| Custom domain and email | No | Yes |
The "No"s are the whole difference between a manager and an administrator. A manager runs programmes; an administrator decides what the organisation is, who belongs to it, and who else gets to decide.
A manager cannot promote themselves. The invitation ceiling is enforced by the platform rather than hidden in the interface, so there is no route around it.
The account-state actions are the one place where the console is more permissive than the platform: a manager can open Manage Users and see the suspend and remove controls, and using one is refused. If that happens to you, the action is an administrator's.
The platform console
There is a further level above all of this: platform staff, who administer every organisation on the platform. It lives at a separate address entirely and is not reachable from any organisation's domain — not by URL, not by permission, not at all. Nothing in these guides applies to it.
Why a screen might be missing
In rough order of likelihood:
Your role does not open it. Check the table above.
You are not attached to it. An instructor sees their own courses. Being able to grade does not mean seeing every course.
Your organisation does not run that feature. Parts of the platform are switched on per organisation. If an entry described in these guides is not in your sidebar at all — not greyed out, simply absent — that is usually why.
It is in the other console. Authoring and grading are in the instructor console; people and settings are in the admin console. The mode switcher is the fastest way to check.
Asking for a role
Roles are granted by administrators under Manage Users. It takes them under a minute. If you are not sure who yours are, the support email on your organisation's sign-in page is the place to start.