The three levels: Journey, Group, Participant — 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 group and participant throughout.

When you run a programme for groups of people, the same question comes up constantly: if I change something, who does it affect? Pacten answers it with three levels. Once you know them, every editing decision becomes obvious — and the interface tells you the scope of a change before you make it.

Level 1 — The journey: your blueprint

The journey is the template your programme runs on. You'll find it on the service itself — open the service and go to its Journey tab. It holds the stages of the experience and the task templates inside each stage, plus the welcome message new participants receive and (for group programmes) your graduation criteria.

Each participant receives their own copy of the journey at the moment they're taken on. That timing matters: the journey as it stands that day is what they get. Editing the journey changes what future participants receive — anyone already running is not changed retroactively. The editor says this in its own words the first time you enter: "Changes here apply to everything seeded from this service in future — not just one. Anything already running won't change retroactively."

Level 2 — The group: a running instance

A group is one real intake moving through the programme together. Open it from your work area and go to its Materials tab — the journey's milestones are laid out there, and opening one lets you rename it, edit its tasks, or attach materials for this group only.

Every edit here reaches the people in this group and nobody else. The editor keeps the scope in front of you the whole time — buttons literally read "Save for all 26 students" — and the footer of the editor spells out the rule: edits apply to this group, now, and do not change the programme journey, so future groups are unaffected.

Level 3 — The participant: individual changes

Sometimes a change should apply to exactly one person. Open the group's roster, click the participant, and use their Programme tab — a banner confirms you're on their copy. Here you can add a task only they will see, or make an existing task required to continue for them alone — which is how one participant can have a mandatory document upload while it stays optional for everyone else.

Where a setting comes from

With three levels in play, the group editor labels the origin of what you're seeing: tasks show "NOT ON JOURNEY" when they were added just for this group, "EDITED HERE" when they differ from the journey, and settings note when "3 students differ" from the group — with a "Reset to journey" link when a group-level change should fall back to the blueprint.

The rules, in one place

• Journey edits → participants taken on from now on. Running groups don't change by themselves.
• Group edits → everyone currently in that group, and nobody outside it.
• Participant edits → that one person only.
• Two deliberate bridges exist: if the journey has improved since a group started, a banner offers "Review changes" to bring that group up to date — it only ever adds, never removes. And if a live group has evolved into something better than the blueprint, "Save as programme journey" makes its structure the starting point for all future groups.

Related guides

• Your journey: the blueprint every participant starts from
• Updating a live group safely
• Customising tasks for one participant
• Required to continue: gating progress on a task
• Save a group's structure as your new blueprint