Roles & access
Who can do what in Theta — per-organization roles and your overall account tier.
Access in Theta works on two levels: the role you hold inside a particular organization, and your overall account tier. They answer different questions.
Your role in an organization
When you join an organization, you're given a role for that space. The same person can be a learner in one organization and an instructor in another.
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Learner | Take lessons, run submissions, view their own reports and progress, and use the practice surfaces (daily/weekly/leaderboards, Explore, Library). |
| Instructor | Everything a learner can, plus design lessons and courses, add and manage members (as learners or instructors), review submissions, grade short-answer quiz items, and manage the organization's element presets. |
| Admin | Everything an instructor can, plus the organization's billing setup — creating its billing account, and issuing access codes that grant the instructor role. |
New members default to Learner. Any instructor or admin can add someone as an Instructor — when inviting them, or by promoting an existing member from the Members tab. The Admin role itself is assigned by Theta, not from inside the organization; in day-to-day use organizations run on Instructor and Learner.
Your personal workspace
Separately from any organization, every account gets a personal workspace — a private space where you can build your own cases and run them, even if you belong to no organization at all. You're the only member, and nobody else can see or join it.
It holds exactly two things:
- My cases — everything you've designed, in the designer or saved from Explore. Run plays a case straight away; Edit reopens it in the designer.
- My submissions — your attempts at those cases, with scoring and reports, the same as any other submission.
It is deliberately not a small organization. There are no members to manage, no courses, and no quizzes — a space of one has nobody to enrol and nobody to assess. That's why cases are run directly rather than assigned. It exists so that designing a case doesn't require someone to grant you an instructor role first.
Your account tier
Separately from any organization, your account has a platform-wide tier:
| Tier | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Subscriber | A normal Theta account. What you can do is governed by your role in each organization (above) and your subscription/entitlements. |
| Service | A Theta system administrator. Access to the platform-wide admin panels (e.g. otoscopy image library, word-list management) that sit outside any single organization. |
The Service tier is reserved for platform operators — it's not something an organization grants. Most users — including instructors and organization admins — are Subscribers.
How access is enforced
Theta checks access on the server for every protected page and every action, so the role you hold genuinely determines what you can do — not just what's hidden in the UI. If you don't see a control you expect, it's almost always because of your role in the current organization. Switch spaces from the sidebar to act with a different role.
What's next
- Signing up & onboarding — getting an account and joining an organization.
- Account & settings — managing your profile and security.