For administrators, editors, and teachers
One of Pathwright’s 'best-kept secrets' is our Cohorts feature which enables you to offer your course Path to multiple groups, or "Cohorts", simultaneously.
For example, you can:
Create a self-paced Cohort for $49 and a guided, schedule-based Cohort with live sessions and personal feedback from a teacher for $249.
Offer premium levels of a course with additional bonus content or more individualized instruction.
Use our "member-created Cohorts" feature, which allows you to make your Path available for anyone to teach to their own private group.
And more!
Whether you are offering your course to one group or to multiple, our publishing tools make it easy to make and track changes to your course, and share them with your learners when you're ready.
☝️How to use these instructions
Depending on how you intend to offer your Paths, you may not need all of our publishing tools right away. Choose from the list below for the instructions you need right now.
If you only plan to offer your Path to one group, you'll only need to publish changes to a single Cohort. 📕
If you plan to offer your Path to multiple groups, learn how to publish changes across multiple Cohorts. 📚
If would like to customize Cohorts taking the same Path, learn how to customize Cohorts that share a Source Path. 📗📘
📕 Publishing within a Cohort Path
You can edit your Cohort Path anytime in Design mode. When you're ready to share these changes with the learners taking the Path, our Publishing icons will let you know the Publish status of each step.
Quickly scan the Publish status of your Path
You can scan your Path and spot where something needs your attention at a glance. Here’s how:
First, it’s helpful to expand all the Lessons in your Path by hitting the expand icon at the top right:
Then, look for the cloud icons to the right of each Step. Hover over them or tap them to see one of three Publish statuses:
Draft: hasn’t been published yet and isn’t visible to learners in a Cohort.
Published: has been published and is visible to your learners.
Changes: has been published before, but has new changes that are not published yet.
Not ready to publish: if Step has Block changes that aren’t saved, it can’t be published until the Block changes are saved.
Publish changes to a Cohort
When you’re ready to Publish changes to a Path, simply:
Press the Publish button at the top of the Path or wherever there’s a draft change.
Review the list of changes in two categories:
Ready to publish: All Lesson & Step changes that are ready and will be shared as soon as you Publish them.
Not ready: Lessons or Steps that can’t be Published yet — a reason they’re not ready and a link to correct the issue are listed for each.
Hit Publish — now all the ready changes will be shared with anyone in your Cohort. You’ll also see a few handy shortcuts for optional follow up actions you may want to take.
💾 Instantly save changes to Blocks
The Blocks you use to add videos, questions, text, and more to a Step do not need to be Published. Block changes are available to everyone — across all Cohorts — as soon as you hit the Save button.
You can also see more about what’s changed since the last save as well as more about when and who made updates.
(The differences in making changes to Blocks vs. the Path can be confusing or limiting if you’re wanting to customize Blocks only for a particular Cohort. Learn how to customize your Cohort for just those learners here.)
📚 Publishing across multiple Cohorts
Do you offer more than one Cohort for a Path? If so, you can use a Source Path to publish changes to multiple Cohorts at once. The Source Path is the 'blueprint' version of your Path that you want to share with all current and future Cohorts.
Scan a Cohort Path to see its Sync Status
When you have multiple active Cohorts, you’ll also see an additional status indicator:
Syncing: The Lesson or Step is identical to the version in the Source Path and will receive updates published from it.
Not-syncing: The changes to these Steps are unique and only visible to the Cohort you’re viewing. The changes will not be over-written by future updates from the Source Path.
Tip: You can quickly glance over your expanded Path to spot the unique, not-syncing items by looking for the “*” icon which always shows up.
Sync back to the Source Path from a Cohort
If there are changes to Lessons or Steps in one Cohort that you’d like to share with all Cohorts, you can Sync those changes with the Source Path in three steps:
Select the Sync button: select the “Sync” option when viewing the Sync Status or after Publishing a Cohort.
Review & Sync: The Sync list shows all changes that are unique in the Cohort you’re looking at and provide the option to sync all — or just a selection — back to the Source Path for using in other Cohorts as well. Once you’re reviewed the list, Sync the changes back. Now your Source Path contains the latest changes selected from the Cohort.
Publish the Source Path: If you’re ready to share the changes Synced with all Cohorts, the final step is to Publish the latest version of the Source Path. (Note that all changes in the Source Path will be Published even ones made before, so you’ll have the opportunity to review the change list before Publishing.)
📗📘 Customizing Cohorts that share a Source Path
Blocks content is currently shared across every Cohort or Source Path where the Step that houses it is included. So let’s say you’ve got Cohort A with an Attend: Live Zoom Meeting Step and Cohort B with the same Attend Step, but each will be using a different meeting link. Updating the link in the Blocks in either Cohort or the Source Path will update it across all locations as soon as the changes are saved. That’s not ideal!
We hope to make Blocks uniquely versionable for Cohorts just like other parts of the Path in the future, but for the time being, there’s a fairly easy workaround:
1. Go to the Cohort and Step that has Blocks you’d like to customize uniquely.
2. Use the copy+paste feature to copy the Step into the same Lesson and move it into the correct order.
3. Delete the original Step from the Path (you can spot the original because it will still indicate that it is Syncing with the Source Path while the copied Step will have a “Draft” status)
4. Customize the Blocks in your new Step however you’d like — since all the Blocks within it are copies that only exist in one Cohort, they won’t impact the Source Path or other Cohorts.
5. Publish the changes to your Cohort.
FAQs
What do we mean by Source, Cohort, and Learner Paths?
Source Path: your Source Path for a course is the best version that you want to share with all current and future Cohorts.
Cohorts: each Cohort is a version of a path specific to a group of learners going through a course together. New Cohorts inherit and share the latest version of the Source Path. In addition, Teachers of a Cohort can uniquely personalize their path by adding additional steps, lessons, schedules, and discussion prompts, but they are not allowed to edit content that is shared with the Source.
Learner Path: under the hood, each learner has their own personal version of the Cohort Path. When you publish or sync updates, learners will receive those changes the next time they load the course. The Learner Path is what you see if you open the Learner Progress screen and select a particular learner.
What's the difference between "publishing", "syncing", and "save"?
"Publishing” is when changes are made to one or more Cohorts. (→)
Publishing can happen from a Cohort or a Source Path, but it always means making the changes available to one or more Cohorts.
”Syncing” refers to changes made back to the Source path. (←)
Syncing means it’s making the change to the Source Path and will stay in-sync with future updates.
"Saving" refers to changes made to Blocks content within a step.
Block changes are available to everyone — across all Cohorts — as soon as you hit the Save button.