The key here is understanding how our different organisational systems work and how they map onto the reality of teaching your module. We're aiming for something simple: all your module data in one consistent place, based on the same set of students. This makes everything easier to access and analyse as you go. Promise.

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Here's the golden rule: each module = one classroom. That's it. Write it on a sticky note. Tattoo it somewhere visible if you must.

Your classroom is where you invite students and assign work. It's the foundation of everything you'll build. And yes, I know what you're thinking: "But I have three different lecturers teaching different sections!" or "I've got separate theory and practical streams!"

I know it feels intuitive to split things up, but keeping everything in a single classroom makes your data management and analysis so much more robust. Plus, a single classroom can be shared and collaborated on with multiple educators (your whole teaching team can pile in there), and it can be archived or ended at the year's end, making it a perfect replicable unit that mirrors your actual module structure.

First, let's clear up the thing everyone asks about. You can read your students' conversations with a tutor in a completely normal classroom. No special setup, no forms, nothing to switch on. Standard classroom, full analytics, and the actual back-and-forth of every chat. For teaching, that is all you need, and you can happily skip the rest of this section.

So the real decision is a different one: are you going to publish or formally analyse this? Writing it up, presenting it, feeding it into a study. That is what a research classroom is for, and it is about consent and provenance rather than access. Fair warning, you'll need a few things in advance:

What you get for that: students are asked to give explicit, informed consent for their data to be used in research, you can see at a glance who has and hasn't consented, and you can request a full structured export of the classroom from us. Tidy, defensible, ready for an ethics committee.

Important bit: students who opt out are left out of the research export, and they get exactly the same learning experience as everyone else. Nobody misses out, and you're staying ethically sound. Win-win.

Within your classroom, the main unit of learning is a pathway. Think of it as a container that holds multiple lessons.

Most lecturers model one pathway per week because, and this is the crucial bit, pathways are the only unit where you can set start and end dates. They're also where you decide whether students need to complete lessons in order, or whether they can cherry-pick what they fancy working on first.

Imagine a typical week in your module. You've probably got:

All of this can (and should!) live inside a single pathway. You're encapsulating everything students need for that week in one manageable chunk. This is particularly brilliant if you've got weekly submissions or tutorial questions, because everything's bundled together where students can find it.

That said, pathways don't have to be time-based. You could use them to model:

For instance, if your module naturally divides into theory and practical components, you might use pathways to contain those different streams. It's your call, use whatever structure makes sense for how you actually teach.

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Lessons are where the learning actually happens. Think of them the same way you'd think of:

Within a typical weekly pathway, you might create separate lessons for your learning materials, your tutorial exercises, and your assessed questions. This granular approach lets you keep everything organised whilst also giving you really powerful analytical tools.

Here's why this matters: you can analyse students' understanding on a lesson-by-lesson basis. Want to know how students are coping with that particularly tricky concept in week 5? Dig into that specific lesson and you'll get insights about learning progress, engagement, and comprehension for just that unit of work. It's rather brilliant and very effective.

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So when you're building out your module in Mindjoy:

This three-tier structure keeps everything consistent, accessible, and, crucially, easy to analyse throughout the teaching period. No more hunting through three different classrooms trying to work out why the data doesn't match up. No more wondering which version of the module you're looking at. Just clean, consolidated data that actually makes sense.

Future you is already feeling grateful. Now go forth and structure your module with confidence! 🚀

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Lessons no longer need to live inside a pathway. You can create standalone lessons in your My Library and assign them directly to classrooms. This is useful for one-off homework, quick assessments, or when you want to draft lessons before organising them into a pathway.

A lesson can belong to multiple pathways, or to none at all. You can move lessons in and out of pathways at any time without losing student data.

When planning your module structure, consider: