Your home page
Signing in as a member of staff lands you on Home. It’s built around one idea: show what actually needs you today, give you one place to type, and put everything else out of the way until you ask for it.
What this does
Section titled “What this does”Home is five things, top to bottom, and it is deliberately short by default.
- A greeting and one box. Good morning, Nadia. Then a single field: “Ask a question, or search for a person, a course, a page.”
- Needs you — counted, permission-filtered signals with somewhere to go.
- A row of tiles for the jobs people actually open the product to do.
- Two quiet columns — where you were last, and what you pinned.
- Everything else — the six main areas, collapsed.
Your first visit
Section titled “Your first visit”New staff get a four-step walkthrough on Home: the ask box, the tiles, Needs you, and the doors. It runs once.
Once means once per person, per organization — not per browser. Dismissing it on your laptop keeps it dismissed on your phone, in a private window, and after clearing site data. Switching to a different organization is a fresh first run, because the doors, tiles and signals genuinely differ there.
The assistant’s own first-run nudge deliberately stands down while the tour is running, and arrives on the next page you open instead — two spotlights on one screen is nobody’s idea of a welcome.
When your organization is new
Section titled “When your organization is new”An organization with nothing in it doesn’t say “nothing needs you” — that’s technically true and useless. Instead Needs you shows the next setup step: create your first course, publish it, add learners.
The ladder stays until the work is actually done. Steps you don’t have permission to do aren’t offered.
The one box
Section titled “The one box”Type a question and it goes to the assistant, in the same conversation you’d get anywhere else in the product. Type a name and it searches — the box offers Search for “…” instead, and Or search people, courses and pages sits underneath.
If AI isn’t switched on for your organization, or your organization isn’t in the assistant rollout, it’s simply a search box. Nothing breaks and nothing is advertised that you can’t use.
The palette — ⌘K
Section titled “The palette — ⌘K”The same box has a full-screen twin you can reach from anywhere, not just Home. Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows) — or use Search & commands in the header — and type. Results arrive grouped:
| Group | What’s in it |
|---|---|
| People | Members of your organization |
| Programs (your organization’s word) | Courses you can reach |
| Assessments (your organization’s word) | Assessments you can reach |
| Enrollment (your organization’s word) | Enrolment offerings |
| Pages | Anywhere in the product you have permission to open |
| Ask | Ask the assistant with what you typed, and Ask the assistant to do this where it reads as an instruction rather than a search |
The Pages group is built from the same permission-aware navigation the sidebar uses, so it never offers a page that would refuse you. ⌘K deliberately won’t steal focus from a field you’re already typing in.
Group headings use your organization’s own words. A word that only says what kind of thing you want is ignored in the match, so “Onboarding track” or “safety quiz” finds the thing called Onboarding or Safety.
Needs you
Section titled “Needs you”A band of counted signals. Each is a real query against your data, not an estimate, and each is omitted entirely if you don’t hold the permission to see it — never shown as a zero, which would tell you something false about your organization.
| Signal | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Waiting for your approval | Four-eyes requests raised by someone else that are still pending and that you hold the permission to decide. Your own never count — you can’t approve them. |
| Submissions to mark | Work waiting more than a set number of days. |
| Learners who’ve gone quiet | People with no activity in a set number of days, including those who never started. |
| Programs with no assessment | They have an assessments section, but nothing in it. |
| Work not handed in | Learners past an assignment’s deadline with nothing submitted. |
The order is fixed and never changes with the numbers: who is waiting on this person first, worth knowing after. An approval that blocks a colleague right now outranks 900 unmarked submissions, which is the opposite of sorting by size — and because the order is stable, a background refresh can’t reshuffle rows under your cursor mid-click.
Each row carries:
- Show me — the rows behind the number.
- Review / Open marking / See who / Open programs — straight to the work, filtered to exactly what the signal counted. The list opens with a banner saying so and a way back to the full list. Review opens Waiting for you.
- Dismiss for now — hides that row for you. It doesn’t change anything for anyone else, and dismissal follows you between devices rather than resetting on reload.
When every signal is zero, the band says one calm thing — “Nothing needs you right now.” — instead of four empty rows.
How “Learners who’ve gone quiet” is counted. It counts people, not enrolments, and only people enrolled as learners. A learner is quiet when nothing has happened on either their enrolment record or their actual work — attempts, answers, progress. Someone who never started counts.
Every alert opens what it counted. Following a signal opens the list filtered by the same rule that produced the number, with a banner saying so and a way back to the full list.
The tiles and the quiet columns
Section titled “The tiles and the quiet columns”The tile row is the jobs people come here to do, commonest first: marking, enrollment, the directory, programs, scheduling, the library, assessments. Create is there too, for making a course.
Tiles are gated by the same navigation rules as the sidebar, so a tile never dead-ends on a permission error.
Below them, two compact lists rather than cards, because they’re reference material and not decisions:
- Where you were last — recent destinations.
- Pinned — anything you pinned in the sidebar.
The side menu stays where you put it
Section titled “The side menu stays where you put it”Opening a module such as Enrollment or Scheduling leaves the side menu as it was; those modules carry their own collapse control for their inner menu.
The editors — a lesson, an assessment, a course’s detail page — collapse the side menu when you open them, because each has its own stage rail. Expanding it there sticks for as long as you’re in the editor.
On a phone, the menu trigger says where you are.
Everything else
Section titled “Everything else”The six main areas of the product — Home, People, Courses, Day to day, My space, Reports — collapsed behind Everything else, always in the same order. Expand it for the full descriptive cards.
That’s why the page is short: the map is available, not imposed.
A note on wording
Section titled “A note on wording”Several labels on this page use your organization’s own vocabulary — what a learner, an instructor, or a group is called. If your terms differ from this article’s, that’s expected. See Terminology.
Reference
Section titled “Reference”| Element | Gate |
|---|---|
| Ask box → assistant | AI enabled · assistant rollout · permission to use AI. Otherwise a search box. |
| Waiting for your approval | Permission to approve the underlying change |
| Submissions to mark | Permission to grade |
| Learners who’ve gone quiet | Permission to see enrollments |
| Programs with no assessment | Permission to see programs |
| Tiles | The same permissions as the matching sidebar entries |
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting”A signal I expect isn’t there. It’s omitted because you don’t hold the permission behind it, or because there’s genuinely nothing to show. Absent and zero look different: a band with rows shows zeroes; a band missing a row means you can’t see that one.
A colleague’s home page has more on it than mine. Permissions. Check My access in your account menu.
I dismissed a signal and want it back. Dismissal is per person and per signal; it returns on the next occurrence rather than needing to be un-dismissed.
Typing in the box searches when I wanted to ask. The assistant isn’t available to you — no AI, no rollout, or no permission to use AI. See Ask the assistant.
The numbers disagree with a report. Signals are counted live at page load against your permissions; reports may be scoped or filtered differently. Use Show me to see the exact rows a signal counted.