Courses & Enrollments
How courses and student enrollments work in Timeback
Overview
Courses are containers for your educational content, and enrollments control which students can access them.
Structure is flexible
How you structure courses is up to you. Some apps create one course per grade level, others organize by topic or skill.
Simpler apps might use a single course for everything.
How Enrollments Work
- You create a course that defines your content structure
- A class is created as a specific offering of that course
- Students enroll in the class, which grants them access to the course's content
- Your app queries a student's enrollments to determine what they should see
Enrollments can also carry metadata like learning goals or custom settings that override course-level defaults. See Enrollments for implementation details.
Course vs Class
These two concepts are related but distinct:
- Course: The content definition (created once)
- Class: A specific offering of that course (e.g.,
Winter 2025)
In other words, students enroll in classes, not courses directly. A single course can have multiple classes.
Example: Grade-Based Courses
One common pattern is to create a separate course for each grade level:
MathApp: Grade 3
MathApp: Grade 4
MathApp: Grade 5Students enroll in their grade-appropriate course, and your app queries enrollments to display the right content. This isn't the only approach. You might instead organize courses by topic, difficulty, or use a single course with internal logic to gate content. See Multi-Grade Apps for more on this pattern.
Using Playcademy?
Playcademy uses a grade-based model.
Courses are created automatically from your config via playcademy timeback setup.