Your first week in the console
This page orients a new staff member to the console in their first week. The goal by Friday is a calm daily routine: you know where to look, what each signal means, and which things genuinely need a person versus which can wait.
The console can look busy on day one because it surfaces a lot of context at once. The skill of the first week is learning to separate the few things that need you from the much larger amount that is simply there to inform you. Once that separation is automatic, the job settles into a short, repeatable loop.
Open the console at 9am, clear the crisis and urgent lanes, glance at Pulse, and close it knowing nothing important is sitting unseen. Everything below is detail on that one loop.
The shape of the console
The console has three jobs, and the navigation follows them.
You respond to what comes in (the Inbox), you publish the weekly arc of content a cohort sees (Authoring), and you watch how the cohort is travelling (Insights). Everything else (Students, Cohorts, Templates, Settings) supports those three.
Knowing this shape matters because it tells you what to ignore in week one. A new staff member should spend their first week almost entirely in the Inbox and Insights. Authoring can wait until the rhythm of responding feels comfortable, because publishing content well depends on first understanding how a cohort reads and reacts to it. Trying to learn everything at once is the fastest way to feel underwater.
The 9am routine
Start each day in the Inbox. New help requests arrive here, sorted by priority. Work top down: crisis first, then urgent, then normal.
For each item, the question is not "can I solve this" but "what is the next right step." That framing is the heart of triageThe skill of moving each help request to the right next step quickly, rather than solving everything yourself.: some requests need a reply, some need a referral, and some need a colleague with a particular scope. You are routing quickly, not resolving everything yourself, and trying to personally close every ticket is how the queue backs up.
- Clear the crisis lane
Crisis-priority items pin to the top regardless of how the list is sorted. Work these before anything else, every day, without exception.
- Work the urgent and overdue items
Next, take anything past its response target. The age of a request tints from muted to amber to red, so what has been waiting is obvious at a glance.
- Move down through normal requests
Acknowledge early, then act. Acknowledging signals to the team that someone has eyes on a ticket even before it is resolved.
- Glance at Pulse, then close
Once the inbox is clear, check the cohort's direction of travel in Insights and you are done for the morning.
Crisis-priority items are re-checked server side, not just tagged by a keyword, so when one appears it has met a real threshold. Always clear that lane before anything else, even if the rest of the inbox is busy. The detail of what happens when a crisis fires is in What fires when a crisis is detected.
Reading the signals
Once the inbox is clear, glance at Insights → Pulse. Pulse shows cohort morale at a glance: the direction of travel, not a single number to chase.
The thing to learn early is to read the curve, not the point. One quiet week is noise. A two-week slide across a cohort is signal. This distinction is the single most useful habit you can build in week one, because reacting to every weekly wobble burns attention you will want for the slides that actually matter.
The Insights pages explain each measure and, importantly, why some views stay hidden until a cohort is large enough that no individual could be identified from them. That suppression is not a bug or missing data; it is a deliberate privacy floor, and understanding it early saves you from chasing numbers that are being withheld on purpose.
What to safely ignore
The most common first-week mistake is treating every notification as urgent.
Most of what the console surfaces is context, not a task. Engagement dipping over a public holiday is expected. A single low check-in is not an alarm. A quiet response week during an exam block usually means students are busy, not that the cohort is struggling. Learning to let these pass is not negligence; it is what keeps you sharp for the signals that genuinely need a person.
Common questions
What if I open the inbox and there is no crisis item?
That is the normal state most days. Crisis items are rare by design. Work the overdue and urgent items next, then move down through normal requests. An empty crisis lane is good news, not a sign you have missed something.
Do I need to learn authoring in week one?
No. Spend week one in the Inbox and Insights until the rhythm of responding feels comfortable. Authoring builds on understanding how a cohort reads and reacts, so it is better learned once the daily loop is second nature.
A check-in came in low. Should I act on it?
Not on its own. Pulse is about the curve over time, not a single point. One low week is noise; a sustained slide across the cohort is what warrants a closer look. Individual help requests, not single check-ins, are what arrive in your inbox for action.
By the end of the week
You should be able to open the console at 9am, clear the crisis and urgent lanes, glance at Pulse, and close it knowing nothing important is sitting unseen. That steady loop is the whole job. The depth (authoring, cohort setup, the crisis runbook) builds on top of it from here.
Related
The fastest answer is usually one question away.