Your first week on First Six

A short on-ramp for someone who was just added to the team. Don't try to learn the whole console — the fastest path is to confirm your scope reads right, pick one concrete first task, ship it, and look at what you shipped from a student's seat.

Four steps, all manual ticks. The platform can't detect whether you've learned the draft-and-publish flow; only you can. Tick each one when you've actually done the thing, not when you've read about it.

Personal scope: your ticks are yours and don't carry across to the rest of the team. New hires after you start fresh.

About 20 min · Setup checklist.

Settle in

Make sure the console looks right for you.

Confirm your scope

When you were added to First Six, your institution admin set your role (content editor, responder, or institution admin) and your scope (institution-wide, program-bound, campus-bound, or course-bound).

Open Settings → Your account and check the scope reads the way you expected. If you're scoped to a single course but you thought you'd be working across a program, talk to your admin before you start drafting — what you can do depends on this.

Tick this step once it looks right (or you've raised it with your admin).

Walk through it

• Open Settings → Your account.
• Confirm the role label matches what you were told.
• Confirm the scope reads as expected.
• If anything is off, ping your institution admin before you start drafting.

In the console: Open Settings.

Find your work

Pick something up and ship it.

Find your first task

The fastest on-ramp is to pick one concrete thing and complete it. Three good first-task options:

1. Draft a new event for an upcoming week (Events → New event). Small, scoped, immediately useful.

2. Add a quick link to the library that students will hit weekly (Library → Quick links). Five minutes, real value.

3. Reply to a Help inbox ticket if you're a responder (Inbox). Skim the open queue, pick one that's well-scoped to your skills, acknowledge and reply.

Pick one. Don't pick three.

Walk through it

• Skim the surface that matches your role (Events for editors, Inbox for responders).
• Pick one concrete item.
• Park anything else for later.

In the console: Back to Home.

Learn the draft-and-publish flow

Almost everything in First Six flows through the same three states: draft → published (live to students) → archived (out of the listing, recoverable). Drafts are private to staff; published rows are visible to the student audience you targeted; archived rows hide from listings but keep the data.

The publish action carries an audit trail — your name, the timestamp, and the change land in /audit. If you ship the wrong thing, unpublish it (which moves it back to draft), edit, and re-publish. Don't delete unless you mean to, and even then archive first.

Walk through it

• On any thing you've drafted, click Publish.
• Open /audit and find your action in the feed.
• Practice the rollback: unpublish, edit, re-publish.

In the console: Open Audit.

See what students see

Walk it as a student before you call it done.

Preview your work as a student

Open /preview and pick a persona from your cohort. The Preview surface renders First Six exactly as that persona would experience it on sign-in: their week 1 hero, their what-matters block, the events that match their audience tags, the help routes that target them.

Look at the thing you just published from this lens. Does it actually reach the audience you targeted? Does the copy read clearly to a first-time student? Are the deep links you added still valid?

Make Preview-as-student a habit. The doc treats it as a load-bearing safety net — staff who skip it ship to-do items with broken links to students.

Walk through it

• Open Preview.
• Pick a persona who should see the thing you published.
• Find the thing on their week page.
• Click into any links you added.

In the console: Open Preview.

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