Skip to main content
Learning management systems — Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, plus internal corporate training platforms — combine curriculum hierarchy with per-user enrollment. A student enrolled in one class section sees that class’s materials but not the rest of the course catalog; an instructor authoring a quiz can edit it even when their general role is “instructor, not owner”. The full sample lives in openfga/sample-stores/stores/lms.

​
Core resources and relations

  • organization — the tenant (school or training department). Roles: admin, instructor, student.
  • course — has an owner who publishes; enrolled instructors edit content; enrolled students view.
  • class — a section of a course with its own enrollment list; instructors and admins enroll students.
  • content — authored by a user; the author can edit/delete; instructors org-wide can edit.
  • activity — assignments and quizzes. The creator and any course instructor can grade; only the assigned student can submit.
  • collection — groupings of materials; collection owner and instructors organize, only admins delete.

​
What the model gets right

Enrollment is per-class, not per-course. A student enrolled in section A of Intro to Biology doesn’t automatically see section B. Modeling the class as its own object with its own enrollment list keeps cross-section data isolated, which matters for grades and discussion threads. Author-edit on content. Whoever authored a piece of content can keep editing it even after their role changes — implemented as a creator (or author) relation in union with the broader instructor relation. Submit is exclusive to the assigned student. Only the student the activity is assigned to can submit, preventing one student from submitting on behalf of another. The grading side is open to instructors and the activity’s creator independently. Publish gated to owners. A course can be edited by enrolled instructors but only published by the owner or an admin. This separates “draft work” from “goes live to students”, which curriculum review processes depend on.

​
Where this maps to OpenFGA features

​
Common extensions

  • Cohorts and programs. Group classes into a program type with its own enrollment list — useful for multi-course certifications.
  • Proctored exams. Add a proctor relation on activity, distinct from creator and instructor, so exam supervision can be delegated without granting grading rights.
  • Time-bounded enrollment. Use conditions to expire student access at the end of a term without rewriting tuples.
  • Parent / guardian access. A guardian relation on the student lets a parent view a child’s grades through a single tuple, without granting any course-edit rights.

​
Working sample

Schema, sample tuples, and assertions are in openfga/sample-stores/stores/lms. For the broader pattern of “role at the org, scoped relationships per record”, see Modeling Roles.
Last modified on September 28, 2026