The Wisteria model

Wisteria organises learning around a single hierarchy. Once you understand the five layers, the rest of the product falls into place.

workspace
  └── departments
        └── courses
              └── modules
                    ├── flashcards (the deck)
                    └── quiz (the questions)

Workspace

The top-level unit. One company = one workspace. Everyone signed in to Wisteria sees only data scoped to their workspace; this is enforced at the database level by row-level security, not by application logic.

Set up at Settings → Company.

Departments

Subdivisions inside a workspace. Departments drive delivery: when a trainer publishes a course, every learner in the chosen department gets that course assigned automatically. Departments are also how the AI evaluator understands org structure — courses surfaced to “Finance” look different from courses surfaced to “Engineering.”

Set up at Settings → Departments.

Every learner belongs to exactly one department (or none, in which case they don’t receive auto-assigned courses).

Courses

The umbrella unit. A course is what a learner sees on their dashboard: title, cover image, a few sentences of description, a department it belongs to. A course is also the unit of approval and publication — trainers don’t submit individual modules for review; they submit the whole course as one bundle.

A course contains one or more modules.

Modules

A learning unit inside a course. Most courses have between one and six modules; the upload flow asks Claude to propose a sensible split from your source document.

A module is the unit of content authoring: a trainer edits one module at a time, with flashcards on the left and a quiz on the right. Two state machines apply per module:

• Authoring status — draft, pending_approval, approved, published, archived
• Ready flag — set by the trainer to mark a module as finished and waiting for the rest of the course to also be ready before submission

Flashcards (the deck)

A module’s flashcards are its lesson content. Each card has a front (a question or prompt) and a back (the answer or explanation). Learners go through cards as a swipe deck — left-to-dismiss, right-to-confirm — saving progress as they go.

Flashcards are stored under a deck row that’s tied 1:1 to its module.

Quizzes

A module’s quiz is the test that gates completion. The pass threshold defaults to 70% (configurable at the course level, with a floor of 70). Wrong answers are saved for review and revision.

Wisteria supports four question types:

• Multiple-choice — pick one of 2–4 options
• Fill in the blank — type a short text answer
• Matching — pair left-column items with right-column items (up to six pairs)
• Oral — record a spoken answer; Wisteria transcribes it, then Claude grades against a model answer

Quizzes auto-save on AI generation and on every manual edit.

What this hierarchy implies

A few non-obvious consequences worth flagging:

• A module always belongs to a course. There’s no such thing as a standalone module. The old flat module list was retired in May 2026.
• Delivery is course-level, not module-level. Departments are assigned to courses, not modules. Publishing a course auto-assigns every learner in the chosen department.
• Approval is course-level too. A trainer submits a whole course; the approver reviews each module inside it, but the trainer waits for one decision per course-cycle, not per-module.
• Tags sit alongside the hierarchy, not inside it. Tags drive workflows and recertification; they’re a cross-cutting label, not a level in the tree.