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 (spaces)
An organization is a workspace that holds people and content: a university program, a clinic's training group, or the public platform space everyone shares. In the app, the area you work inside for a given organization is called a space.
- 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 spaces you belong to from the dashboard and the space switcher in 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, video, embeds). Lessons are where the simulation happens.
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.
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.
- Speech in Quiet — SRT, word recognition, and sound-sensitivity testing.
- 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.