Rotating roles across your groups — Pacten Guides

2026-09-24

Your workspace may call a group a Cohort, a Class, or a Trip, and its people Students or Members — same features, your sector's words. This guide says cohort and students.

Groups decide who works together. Role rotation decides who leads, and makes sure it is not the same person every week. The teams stay put; the roles move around them.

Where to find it

Role rotation lives underneath the groups on the cohort's Groups tab. It only appears once you have created at least one group — if you cannot see it, that is why. You set it up once and it covers every group in the cohort, not one at a time.

Setting it up

You are describing two things: how long the rotation runs, and which roles rotate.

• Periods — how many, when they start, and what to call them. The label defaults to Week, so you get Week 1, Week 2 and so on. Change it if your programme runs in sprints, modules or phases.
• Roles — each with a number of seats, meaning how many people hold that role at the same time in each group. The defaults are a sensible starting point: Project Manager (1 seat), Project Coordinator (1) and Subject Matter Expert (3).

Order matters here, and the panel says so: "Roles (top role rotates through everyone first)". Put the role you most want everyone to experience at the top.

Then press Generate rotation.

The fairness rule

The generator is not random. Within a group, nobody holds a role a second time until everyone in that group has held it once. That is the whole point of the feature — it is the guarantee a hand-built spreadsheet usually fails to keep, and it is why you should not need to check the matrix row by row.

Reading and adjusting the matrix

The result is a grid: groups down one side, periods across the top, and who holds which role in each cell.

• Swap two people — click a cell. The tooltip tells you the rule: "Click to swap with another member of this column". Swaps stay inside the same period, so the week keeps a full set of roles.
• Rename a role — click its name.
• Regenerate — "Re-run the generator against current group rosters". This is the one to use after you have added or removed students, because a rotation generated earlier does not know about them.

Publishing it

A new rotation is a draft, and drafts are yours alone — students see nothing. When it is right, press Publish to students. You can Unpublish again at any time.

Once published, one more choice controls how much students see:

• Full matrix visible — everyone can see the whole schedule, including the weeks they will lead later.
• Current week only — students see the role they hold right now and nothing further ahead.

Toggle between them at any time; it takes effect immediately.

When the group changes underneath it

A rotation is generated against the rosters as they were at the time. If you later move someone between groups, or enrol somebody new, the published schedule is flagged as out of step so you are not left handing a role to a student who is no longer in that team. Regenerate brings it back in line.

Letting people know

Students can be emailed the role they are holding, tracked per period so you can see who has been told. When everyone in a period has been notified, the panel confirms it rather than leaving you guessing.

Deleting a rotation is safe

Removing a rotation asks first, and is explicit about the blast radius: "Groups and members stay; the role schedule is removed." Your teams and everyone in them survive — only the schedule of who leads when goes away.

Related guides

• Splitting a cohort into groups
• Managing a group experience
• Updating a live group safely