Types of User Roles

On Teachable, each user role in your school is associated with different privileges. This article gives you an overview of the types of user roles in your school and their respective privileges.

Overview

There are five main types of user roles in your school—the primary owner, owners, authors, affiliates, and students. If you’re on the Business plan, then you can also create custom user roles, which allow you to pick and choose which privileges to grant a user in your school.

There can only be one primary owner in your school; however, depending on your plan, you can have multiple owners and authors (aka admin-level users). On any plan, you can have an unlimited amount of students and affiliates in your school.

You can learn more about each role from the Settings > Roles tab of your school admin.

From the Settings > Roles tab, you can view how many users are assigned to each role. You can also click the View Permissions button next to each role type to see the permissions associated with each role.

Primary Owner

The primary owner has complete administrative rights over a school, and is the only user that can:

• Set up and update payment gateways
• Delete the school
• Transfer primary ownership
• Grant or revoke owner privileges
• Change other admins and users passwords
• Update billing and plan information
• Fill out and submit tax forms for the school
• Access the Teachable Community 
• Access TeachableU
• Create and edit custom user roles

In the Users > Owners section of your school admin, primary owners are denoted with a “P” icon:

Learn more about how to transfer primary ownership in this Knowledge Base article.

Owners

Owners have access to all administrative rights over a school except those restricted to the primary owner.

Owners also have full administrative rights over users, students, authors, and affiliates.

Learn more about adding owners to your school and owner privileges.

Authors

Authors are admin-level users. By default, once an author is designated to a course, they can do the following from their author dashboard:

• Modify their author bio
• View transactions associated with their course(s)
• View their earnings statements
• Set their own preferences for enrollment, subscription, and comment notifications
• View past payouts to their author account
• Change their payout information
• Create a course

On the Professional plan and up, you can grant additional author privileges from the Author permissions section of the Settings > Roles page, including the ability to:

• Publish courses
• Email students in their course(s)
• Set course prices
• Create coupons for their course(s)
• Import students into their course(s) (Business plan and up)
• Customize sales pages for their course(s)
• Manage and issue certificates of completion for their course(s)

Learn more about adding and managing authors in your school.

Affiliates

Affiliates are users in your school who promote your school and receive a commission of earnings generated from sales associated with their affiliate code. They are not admin-level users, therefore, they do not have any privileges in your school.

However, they can log in to their affiliate dashboard and do the following:

• Generate affiliates links with their affiliate code
• View the transactions they have been credited for
• View past payouts to their affiliate account
• Change their payout information

Learn more about adding and managing affiliates in your school.

Students

Students are any users who have enrolled in your school, course(s), or coaching products. They are not admin-level users, therefore, they do not have any privileges in your school.

There is no limit on the number of students you can have in your school. These include enrollments in your free course, purchases of a paid plan, enrollments in your school, and manual enrollments.

From the Settings > Roles tab, you can toggle on the Prevent payment plan cancellations setting if you would like to prevent students from canceling credit/debit purchases of payment plans from their profile & billing settings.

Custom user roles (Business plan)

On the Business plan, primary owners can create custom user roles. These users can be admin-level users, depending on the types of permissions applied.

Learn more about creating and managing custom user roles in your school.

Change user roles

The Primary Owner, Owner, Author, Affiliate, and Custom User role types cannot be combined. If you have a user you would like to have multiple roles, it is recommended to have that user create a second account in the school under a different email address.

The Student role is one exception. Users can have the student role, and then add any other role in addition.

To change a user from one role to another, you will first need to remove the undesired role. Then, you will be able to add the new role type.

For more information on how to add or remove roles from a user’s profile, please see our Knowledge Base articles for each user role:

• Owners
• Authors
• Affiliates
• Custom users