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Roles & permissions

PulseLMS has six roles. Every person in your organization holds one (sometimes more), and the role decides what appears in their sidebar and what they can do. Roles are assigned by an org admin (or a manager for their own team, where permitted) from People.

Where roles come from

Roles are client roles on the identity provider, carried in your sign-in token. platform_admin is a platform-wide (realm) role; the other five are scoped to your organization. Changing a role takes effect on the person's next sign-in or token refresh.


The six roles

Role In one line
Learner Takes assigned courses, quizzes, and earns certificates.
Instructor Supports and grades learners in the courses they teach.
Author Creates, edits, and publishes courses, quizzes, and programs.
Manager Sees and assigns training for their team; runs team reports.
Org admin Administers the whole organization end to end.
Platform admin Operates across organizations at the platform level.

Permission matrix

Legend: full access · Team limited to the person's team · Own limited to content they authored/teach · no access.

Learning

Capability Learner Instructor Author Manager Org admin
View Dashboard & My Learning
Browse catalog, self-enroll (if enabled)
Take courses, quizzes, programs
Notes, bookmarks, discussions
Earn achievements & certificates

Authoring

Capability Learner Instructor Author Manager Org admin
Create / edit courses & lessons
Upload & configure video
Build quizzes & question banks Own
Create programs (learning paths)
Publish courses / attach publish notes

Instruction

Capability Learner Instructor Author Manager Org admin
Grade quiz attempts Own Own
Approve quiz retakes / resets Own Own
Nudge learners Own Team
View learner progress Own Team

\"Team\" is enforced, not advisory

Where this table says Team, the API refuses the action for anyone outside the teams that manager manages; it does not quietly do nothing for them. That now includes resetting an enrollment: if your organization grants a custom role the reset permission, it still only reaches that manager's own team.

People & assignments

Capability Learner Instructor Author Manager Org admin
View People directory Team
Invite / add members
Assign / revoke roles
Deactivate members
Create / manage teams Team
Assign courses & programs Team

Reporting

Capability Learner Instructor Author Manager Org admin
View own transcript
Learner transcripts (others) Own Team
Team / department rollups Team
Quiz item-analysis Own Own Team
Export / schedule reports Team

Administration

Capability Learner Instructor Author Manager Org admin
Branding / white-label
Compliance (e-signature, recert)
Notifications configuration
API keys & webhooks
Edition (Enterprise / Community)
Audit log

Platform admin

platform_admin is a platform-wide role held by PulseTech operators, not by customer staff. It exists for cross-organization operations and support and sits outside the per-organization matrix above. Day-to-day administration of your organization is done by an org admin.


Notes on scope

  • Managers are the team-scoped variant of an admin: everything they can do, they can do for their team only. See teams & managers.
  • Own for instructors and authors means the courses or quizzes they teach or authored, not the whole catalog.
  • A person can hold more than one role (for example, author + instructor); their effective permissions are the union of their roles.

For the sign-in and provisioning side of roles, see getting started and the integrations guide.