Communities
Communities decide how the learners of a single course coexist and talk to each other. Where teams govern the staff who produce and maintain a course, communities are the layer for the learners who learn together — the cohorts a course is split into.
Communities: the cohorts of a course
A community groups the learners of a course. A single course can have many communities, and each learner belongs to exactly one per course. Each community keeps its own discussion — the learner talks with their community, not with the whole course.
Communities become available when the Community feature is enabled on the content. When you enable it on an atemporal course, the system guarantees at least one default open community (named ‘General’), reproducing the behavior of a single feed.
Open or closed
The community's mode defines how learners join it:
| Mode | How the learner joins | Rules |
|---|---|---|
open | The learner joins on their own | Must be enrolled in the course and not already belong to another community of it |
closed | The staff assigns the learner | Only someone with the community function (or an owner/admin) can add or move learners |
Since each learner has one community per course, assigning someone to a new community automatically moves them, removing them from the previous one. A learner can only join an open community; trying to enter a closed community is refused.
Per-community discussion
Discussion and Q&A are scoped per community, not per course. A learner sees and posts within their own community's feed; a course with three communities keeps three separate conversations. Staff who moderate see all of them.
Tutor
A community can have a tutor: a moderator of that specific community. This is different from the organization staff, who moderate all the communities of the course.
Who can be a community's tutor (validated on assignment):
- the course's owner, as long as they are still a member of the organization;
- a member of the owning team who carries the community role and remains a member of the organization;
- a learner enrolled in the course — the ‘monitor’ exception, where a peer takes on moderation.
The role names referenced here (community, owning team) are defined in Teams; this page only covers how they apply inside a community.
Badges: instructor, tutor, and star
Within a community, a member can be promoted to star (star) — a peer recognition. The star is only a badge: it never grants moderation power. Promoting or demoting the star falls to the community's tutor or the staff.
When badges overlap on the same person, this precedence applies (the strongest prevails):
| Precedence | Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (strongest) | Instructor | Staff with the content function over the course |
| 2 | Tutor | Moderator of that community |
| 3 | Star | Peer recognition, no moderation |
Dated cohorts (temporal courses)
In a temporal course, communities stop being perennial feeds and become dated cohorts. Each cohort has its own window and capacity:
| Field | Role |
|---|---|
startsAt | Cohort start (also anchors the content drip) |
endsAt | Cohort end |
seatLimit | Seats; empty means unlimited |
enrollClosesAt | Optional enrollment cutoff, before the end |
The schedule validation rules:
- the seat limit, if provided, must be positive (empty = unlimited);
- the end must be after the start;
- the enrollment cutoff cannot be after the end;
- in a temporal course, creating a cohort requires a start and an end, and an update cannot erase them.
Each cohort's state and availability derive from these dates:
| State | When | Accepts enrollment? |
|---|---|---|
upcoming | Before the start | Yes — the learner enrolls ahead of time |
active | Between start and end | Yes — late entries until the window closes |
ended | From the end onward | No |
A cohort accepts enrollment while there is a seat available and the window is open (now before enrollClosesAt, or before endsAt when there is no cutoff). A full or ended cohort is closed. Before the learner commits, the enrollment selector shows only the cohorts with a seat available and an open window, along with the number of remaining seats and the tutor's name.
Enrolling into a cohort
Because the cohort's startsAt anchors the content drip, joining a cohort is what sets the pace of a temporal course. A learner picks an open cohort from the enrollment selector, takes one of its seats, and their drip schedule counts forward from that cohort's start — not from the day they signed up.
Round-robin tutor assignment
In courses with per-team cohorts, the tutor can be assigned by round-robin. The behavior has three modes:
- none — no automatic tutor assignment;
- fixed — a fixed tutor defined by the team;
- least-loaded — automatically picks the least-loaded candidate.
In balanced mode, the system selects, from within the candidate pool, whoever is tutoring the fewest communities at the moment; ties are resolved by the pool order. There is no stored round-robin pointer — the load is recomputed on each assignment. The pool is made up of the owning-team members who carry the community role and are still members of the organization (the same intersection used to validate a fixed tutor).