Core concepts
The handful of ideas — organizations, courses, lessons, elements, submissions — that everything else in Theta builds on.
Theta has a small vocabulary. Once these five ideas click, the rest of the product — and the rest of these docs — falls into place.
Organizations
An organization is a workspace that holds people and content: a university program, a clinic's training group, or the public Theta platform everyone shares. Every user also gets a personal workspace — an organization of one, where you design and run your own lessons with nobody to enrol.
- Every person belongs to one or more organizations, each with a role in that organization (see Roles & access).
- Content — courses, lessons, presets — is owned by an organization, not by an individual.
- You switch between the organizations you belong to from the dashboard and the switcher at the top of the sidebar.
Courses
A course is a container for learning content inside an organization. There are a couple of flavours:
| Course style | How learners move through it |
|---|---|
| Sequential | Items are gated — you complete one to unlock the next. |
| Library | Topic-grouped, browseable in any order, with light progress tracking. |
A course is made of items: lessons, quizzes, and passive content blocks (rich text — headings, lists, links, tables and uploaded images — plus video, PDFs and embeds). Lessons are where the simulation happens.
A course can also require other courses to be finished first — for example, a program can insist on Intro to Theta before any of its own courses open. See Course access & prerequisites.
Lessons
A lesson is an ordered list of elements that a learner works through in a single sitting. An instructor builds lessons in the Designer.
A lesson is the unit a learner submits — when you finish working through its elements, you submit the whole lesson at once.
The word is the same everywhere you build or play one: the org's Lessons tab, your personal workspace, the Library and the Weekly challenge all list lessons. The one exception is the Audiogram of the Day, which isn't a lesson at all — it's a single audiogram to find, so those screens say audiogram.
Elements
An element is one simulation or content block inside a lesson. Theta ships several element types:
- Audiometry — pure-tone testing on a simulated audiometer.
- Otoscopy — inspecting the ear canal and eardrum.
- Tympanometry — middle-ear immittance / tympanograms.
- Acoustic Reflexes — reflex threshold testing.
- Acoustic Reflex Decay — whether the reflex holds through a sustained tone.
- Speech in Quiet — SRT, word recognition, and sound-sensitivity testing.
- Otoacoustic Emissions — reading a DP-gram and calling each emission.
- Auditory Brainstem Response — electrode prep, waveform marking, and latency interpretation.
- Hearing Aids — one case: choose the aid, then verify it with real-ear measurement — either step or both.
- Hearing Aid Fitting — the fitting appointment for a Hearing Aid case: the patient comes in wearing the aid as the learner left it after verification, with complaints about it, and the learner fine-tunes it until they're happy.
- Questionnaire — a completed COSI, RHHI, RHHI-S, or APHAB shown as patient context.
- Information — rich-text content and free-text prompts.
Every simulation element follows the same four-phase lifecycle, which is the single most important idea in Theta:
| Phase | Who | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Design | Instructor | Set up the case — the values the learner must discover, and what gets scored. |
| Submission | Learner | Perform the testing and record results. |
| Scoring | Automatic | Submitted values are compared to designed values. |
| Report | Automatic | Scored and report-only items become a PDF. |
Templates vs. fixed values
Most elements can be fixed (every learner sees the exact same case) or a template (each learner gets a fresh case generated from a category you choose at design time). This is what lets one lesson give a whole class different patients while testing the same skill.
Submissions
A submission is one learner's attempt at one lesson. It moves through states:
- In progress — the learner is working through the elements; progress is saved as they go.
- Submitted — the learner has finished and handed it in.
- Scored — Theta has compared their work to the design and produced a report.
A learner can have multiple submissions of the same lesson over time (subject to any attempt limits the instructor sets).
Putting it together
An instructor in an organization builds a lesson of elements inside a course. A learner opens that lesson, works through each element, and creates a submission, which Theta scores and turns into a report.
Ready for more? Continue to Roles & access, or jump straight to Building a lesson.