Summary
ProgrammeOS — the Campus area of the menu — is what turns a programme from a catalogue entry into a group of people moving through it together. A programme says what will be taught. A programme instance says when it is being run and by whom. A cohort is the group of people running through that instance.
Everything else in the module hangs off that distinction: phases belong to an instance, members belong to a cohort, and the journey view is a cohort’s progress through the instance’s phases.
Who This Guide Is For
- Academic and programme managers who run intakes
- Administrators loading people onto a cohort
- Anyone who has to answer “how is this group actually doing”
Prerequisites
- A programme on the system, with its modules or outcomes captured
- Learners registered, or a register ready to import
- A view on how the programme is phased — induction, theory, workplace, assessment
Step 1: Create the Instance
Navigate to Campus → Programmes.
An instance is one delivery of a programme: a code, a start and end date, a site, a responsible manager. Create a new instance for each intake rather than reusing one and changing the dates — the old cohort’s history is attached to the old instance, and editing the dates rewrites the past.
Step 2: Phase the Instance
Set out the phases the instance runs through — induction, knowledge, practical, workplace, final assessment, certification. Phases are how the journey view knows what “on track” means. An instance with no phases produces a journey view with nothing to compare against.
Step 3: Create the Cohort and Load the People
Navigate to Campus → Cohorts, create the cohort, then Campus → People to add members.
Members can be added individually or imported in a batch. Import first, correct afterwards — the import reports what it could not match, and correcting twenty rows against a report is faster than typing two hundred.
A cohort has a lifecycle: draft, configuration, enrolment, onboarding, ready, active, and onward through assessment and completion. Move it deliberately. The state is what other parts of the platform read to decide whether a cohort should appear in scheduling, in funding claims and in readiness reviews.
Step 4: Watch the Journey
Navigate to Campus → Journey.
The journey view is the cohort against its phases: who is where, who has stalled, who has finished a phase without the evidence that phase requires. It is the single most useful screen in the module and it is computed, not maintained — it reflects attendance, submissions, assessments and documents as they land.
Step 5: Let Attention Find the Problems
Navigate to Campus → Attention.
Attention is the exception list: the members the engagement rules have flagged. Rules are configurable, and the defaults are the obvious ones — consecutive absences, an overdue submission, a phase entered without its prerequisites.
The point of a risk score is the intervention that follows it. Record the intervention against the member when you act, so that the next person to look at that learner can see what was already tried. A risk score with no intervention history behind it makes every reviewer start from zero.
Tip: Review Attention weekly, at a fixed time, with the people who can actually act. A list nobody meets about is a list that grows.
Step 6: Give the Cohort a Home
Campus → Today is the cohort’s own daily view — what is on, what is due, what was announced. Campus → Activities carries the tasks and submissions. Campus → Engagement shows participation over time rather than at a point.
Learners see their side of this at My Campus, including their cohort and its activities.
Step 7: Close the Cohort Properly
When delivery ends, move the cohort through completion rather than leaving it active. A cohort left active forever distorts every count on the platform that asks “how many learners are we currently delivering to” — which is most of the counts an executive reads.
What Good Looks Like
- One instance per intake, never a reused one with edited dates
- Phases defined before the first member is loaded
- Attention reviewed weekly, and interventions recorded when taken
- Cohorts closed when they finish
Common Mistakes
- Reusing an instance for a second intake. It rewrites the first intake’s history.
- Loading people before phasing the instance. The journey view then has no shape.
- Treating risk scores as a report. They are a work queue.
- Confusing a cohort with a class group. A cohort is an intake; a class group is who sits in a room together. See the ClassroomOS guide.