For schools and bootcamps

School accounts give instructors the tools to run a class on Gheima, whether a university course or a bootcamp cohort: group students into cohorts, invite them, and graduate them to their own accounts.

Cohorts#

A cohort is a named group of students for a class or term. From “Manage cohorts”, click “New cohort”, give it a name (e.g. Cohort 2026) and an optional description. Cards show whether a cohort is active and how many students it has. Set its start and end dates when you create it or later from “Edit”; editing a cohort keeps any field you don't change.

Invite students#

1. 1

   Open a cohort

   Open the cohort you want to add students to.

2. 2

   Invite students

   Click "Invite students" and paste emails, one per line or separated by commas. You can invite up to 500 at a time.

3. 3

   Students accept

   Each student gets an invite link and joins as a student. Existing members and pending invites are skipped.

The Students page lists everyone with their cohort and status: active, graduated, dropped, or suspended. A student in no cohort shows as "enrolled". You can search the list and export it to CSV.

Join links#

Instead of inviting by email, open a join link on a cohort and share it with the class. Anyone who signs in through it joins as a student of that cohort while seats last, including a student who has no Gheima account yet. A link lasts 7 days by default and up to 90. “New link” replaces it and the old one stops working at once; “Revoke” closes it. Students who already joined stay. A link never lets back in a student the school removed or graduated.

On a cohort you can also suspend a student, and resume them later. A suspended student is out of the active count and their assignments are paused: they can't see or start one until you resume them. The rest of their work is unchanged. To end access, graduate them. “Remove” marks them dropped from the cohort.

What students see#

Inside a school, each student sees and works on only what they created: their own projects, services, databases, buckets, cron jobs and the rest. A classmate's work does not appear in their lists, and opening it directly reads as not found. Owners, admins and instructors see everything in the school. Students' web services sleep after 30 idle minutes and wake on the next visit. Their work runs in Casablanca.

Students deploy from public repositories, by URL. The school's GitHub and GitLab connections are not offered to them, and a student's service never builds with them, so a private repository the school holds (solutions, say) stays out of reach. To keep a starter private, add your students to a GitHub organisation or GitHub Classroom and have each one copy it into a public repository of their own, which they deploy like any other.

Assignments#

On a cohort's Assignments page, post an assignment: a title, an optional description and due date, and a public starter repository on GitHub or GitLab with its branch. Each student clicks “Start”, and Gheima creates a project and a service of their own from the starter and deploys it. A github.com starter offers “Use this template”, and a gitlab.com one “Fork on GitLab”, so the student gets their own copy to push to.

The board lists every student in the cohort as not started, started, submitted or late, with their service's status and live URL. A student has handed in when a deploy of their own commit, not the starter's, goes live: on or before the due date it counts as submitted, after it as late. You can export the board to CSV.

Instructors#

Instructors run cohorts, invite students and graduate them. The school's owner or an admin invites one from “Invite instructor” on the School overview, or turns an existing member into an instructor (and back) from the Team page. Students can never be promoted this way, and instructors cannot appoint other instructors.

Graduation#

On a cohort, select students and click "Graduate". Their portfolio projects, with those projects' databases, move to each student's personal account. Other projects stay with the school, and the student loses access to them. What moved keeps running for 180 days even where it is more than the Free plan includes, so a graduate's portfolio stays live while they look for work. A project is a portfolio project when its “Portfolio project” switch, on the project's page, is on; students can set it on their own projects.

Showcase#

Turn on a cohort's showcase to publish a public page of the projects students choose to share. A student opts a project in with “Show on cohort showcase” on the project's page. The page shows each project's name and description, the student's name and the live URL, never an email. A student who is dropped or suspended leaves the page.

Limits#