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: staff know where to look, what each signal means, and which things genuinely need a person versus which can wait.
The shape of the console
The console has three jobs, and the navigation follows them.
Staff respond to what comes in (the Inbox), they publish the weekly arc of content a cohort sees (Authoring), and they watch how the cohort is travelling (Insights). Everything else (Students, Cohorts, Templates, Settings) supports those three.
A new staff member should spend week one almost entirely in the Inbox and Insights. Authoring can wait until the rhythm of responding feels comfortable.
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." Some requests need a reply. Some need a referral. Some need a colleague with a particular scope. Triage is about routing quickly, not resolving everything yourself.
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.
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. 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.
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. The What to ignore page lists the signals that look urgent but rarely are, so you can spend your attention where it counts.
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.
The fastest answer is usually one question away.