Enabling and creating cohorts in Open edX

With Open edX, you can create student groups called cohorts. Using these cohorts, you can create content or discussion groups that are visible to only specific sets of students. Cohorts can be defined manually or automatically - by location, education level, company, school, and more. 

The first step is to start the LMS, and then navigate to your Instructor Dashboard. 

Next, click Add Cohort. 

Now, you will have the ability to name your cohort and configure its default settings. For more on content groups read our article on Providing different content to cohorts of students in Open edX via content groups. The Cohort Assignment Method simply dictates how students should be assigned to cohorts:

• Automatic means that learners will be automatically assigned to the cohort when they join the course. It's a good idea to have one automatic cohort (which you have by default) which will 'catch' all learners who are not assigned to a cohort. If multiple cohorts are set to automatic, they will be divided evenly and randomly between those cohorts.
• Manual means that you will be assigning learners to their cohorts completely manually. Nobody will end up in this cohort without you adding them.

Once you hit Save, that's all there is to it! You should now be able to add students to your newly created cohort (as long as it's been configured as a manual cohort) by heading down to Manage Students.

Note: If you wish to add students via CSV, be sure to read this article on Assign learners to cohorts by uploading a csv file.

Bug Warning: At the time of writing, there is a known bug with cohort assignments when a learner is present on another Tahoe site. If this is the case, the batch assignment will fail for all learners in that batch. For this reason, if you fail to assign any learners the first time, we recommend assigning them in smaller batches instead of all at once, and contacting support once you have figured out once you know which learner causes the error. We'll get this fixed, but that should help in the short-term!