Glossary

These definitions describe how terms are used in RolePlay LMS.

Activity

A placement of one chatbot in an LMS course: a Moodle or Canvas item on a course page that a student clicks. One chatbot can sit behind more than one activity. Results are sent through the activity’s gradebook item when the LMS provides one, so a mark belongs to the activity rather than to the chatbot. See Opening the activity.

Assessor gate

The required teacher review before a rubric mark is sent to the gradebook. The response shows Awaiting review until a teacher checks the result and selects Commit to gradebook. If automatic marking fails, the teacher must enter a mark — nothing is passed or failed by default. Completion-only results do not use this gate. See Releasing a mark.

Attempt

One conversation allowed under Conversations per student. A student sees how many they have before they start — Conversation 2 of 3. Opening the activity without starting does not use one, and staff tests do not count. With memory on, one continuing thread counts once across all its sittings. The interface uses the word conversations, not “attempt”.

Chatbot

The thing you build: a character, a scenario, a set of instructions, some settings, and optionally some teaching content. It is the unit everything else hangs off — the dashboard lists chatbots, an activity points at a chatbot, and conversations belong to one. A chatbot has one owner, and it lives in one organisation.

Conversation

One session between a student and a chatbot, from Start chat to the end. It is what you read in the responses list, what carries a rating and a mark, and what a student can download. A conversation stays open until the student ends it, the time limit runs out, or a scheduled sweep closes an abandoned one — the last of which is badged Unfinished so you can read a short transcript correctly.

Copy

A new chatbot made from an existing one, taking its prompts, settings and teaching content. Two controls make copies: Duplicate, which copies your own chatbot, and creating From a template, which copies one your organisation published. Either way the source is untouched afterwards — a copy is a snapshot, not a link. Changing a template does not change the chatbots already made from it.

Organisation

Your institution’s space for its people, chatbots, conversations and LMS registrations. Ordinary chatbots and conversations are separated by organisation. Templates can be shared across organisations, but only the platform operator can set that up. A share link from one organisation is refused when used by an account in another, with a card that deliberately names neither the chatbot nor its owner.

Passback mode

What the gradebook is told when a student finishes, set by Results sent to the LMS. Three values:

Choosing a mark without writing a rubric falls back to completion, whatever the setting says — see Additional settings.

Rubric

Marking criteria entered one per line, in your own words. It is prose, not a matrix: Acknowledges the person’s feelings before correcting them is a criterion. Each result is shown as Met or Not met. A criterion marked Met is only counted when its supporting quotation can be verified in the student transcript. If it cannot, the criterion appears under Not counted, because the wording could not be found in the transcript. A Not met criterion does not require a supporting quotation. You see the working before anything reaches the gradebook.

Share link

The ?join= address copied from a dashboard row. It opens a chatbot outside the LMS for an authorised account, on the same activity screen a student meets in an LMS. Share-link conversations have no LMS gradebook, so they do not show an assessor panel.

Treat the link as a key: anyone signed in who holds it can spend the owning account’s time. Two settings bound it — Conversations on this link caps the total, and Replace this link on the edit screen revokes it outright, with no grace period.

For an organisation’s chatbot the link only works for accounts in that organisation. A chatbot owned by an individual has no organisation to check against, so its link works for any signed-in account that holds it — which is why the cap and the replace button matter more there.

Following an individual’s link is also how their learners get accounts. Somebody who signs in through it, and who belongs to no organisation already, becomes a student of the account that invited them: their conversations appear on that person’s Responses screen, and the time is charged to that person. They get the student view and nothing else — no dashboard, no other people’s conversations, no settings. An address that already belongs to a registered organisation is never moved; they stay with their organisation.

Teaching content

The documents a chatbot works from — a handout, a chapter, notes, or a pack from the course generator. Without it a chatbot answers from the model’s general knowledge, which is confident and sometimes wrong. A teaching character teaches from the content; a roleplay character treats it as what it knows and stays in character. Accepted file types are listed on the upload form, and a scanned PDF is refused because there is no text in it to read. See Teaching content.

Template

A chatbot marked Available as a template, which lets other teachers in your organisation start a new one from it and inherit the prompts and settings. It is how a department keeps its scenarios consistent instead of every teacher writing prompts from scratch. A template is an ordinary chatbot with a switch on: it can still be used, tested and edited. Lead teachers and administrators can publish one, as can a teacher on an LMS with authoring on for their own chatbot; any teacher can start from one. See Templates.

Thread

A conversation that continues across more than one visit, on a chatbot with Remember each student on. The student pauses, comes back, and picks up where they left off; the responses list shows it as one row dated from when it started, badged with how many parts it has. A thread’s time limit covers the whole thread, not each visit, and it counts as one conversation however many times the student returns.

Unit code

Your organisation’s code for the unit a chatbot belongs to, such as CHCDIV001. It groups and searches chatbots on your dashboard and nothing else — students never see it. It is not validated against any national register, so whatever your institution actually calls the unit is the right thing to type.