Co-Instructors

What a co-instructor is

A co-instructor is another teacher inside one of your courses. They sign in with their own ProfDesk account, and inside your course they can grade submissions, publish learning modules, edit assessments, upload and open course files, see the full roster and grant extensions. Everything they do is recorded under their own name, so your gradebook and activity history show who marked what.

A co-instructor teaches the class. They do not administer it. The course itself, its files, its student roster and its billing stay with you as the owner, and the actions that would change or copy the course as a whole stay yours alone.

Plan and places

Co-instructors are a ProfDesk Pro feature. Pro includes 1 free co-instructor place, and any colleague who has their own ProfDesk Pro can join without using it.

• The free place is held by one colleague. That colleague can be on the Free plan and can co-teach every course you own, so a helper in all of your sections needs only one place.
• A colleague with their own Pro does not use the place. Any number of them can join, and each can join as many of your courses as you like.
• A course can have up to 5 co-instructors, counting invitations that are still waiting. Withdrawing an invitation makes room again.
• Only the course owner can invite. A co-instructor cannot invite anyone else into the course.
• The place is decided when somebody accepts, not when you invite. The invitation does not look at your colleague's plan. If the free place is already in use and they are on Free, the screen they open says so and offers ProfDesk Pro. The invitation stays open for 7 days, so they can upgrade and use the same link.

Course Settings labels only two things: the colleague who uses your free place, and any colleague who is read-only for want of Pro. Nobody else gets a plan label, so you are never shown which of your colleagues pay.

How to invite a co-instructor

1. Open the course and click Settings, then stay on the General tab.
2. Find the Co-instructor card, next to Re-teach.
3. Enter your colleague's email address and click Send invitation.
4. They accept from the emailed link. The link works once and expires in 7 days. The screen it opens names the course and names you before they accept, and says whether joining uses your free place or their own Pro, and that you can see this. Nobody accepts blind.

Once accepted, the course appears for them under Invited on their courses page, kept separate from the courses they own themselves.

What a co-instructor can and cannot do

A co-instructor can

A co-instructor cannot

Grade submissions in ZenGrader, by hand or with AI Create and edit assessments, questions and rubrics Build, publish and sequence learning modules Upload, open and manage course files Build and run quizzes, including from their own question bank See the full roster and every student's work Grant deadline extensions and extra quiz attempts Take attendance and post announcements Release grades and use course analytics Adjust course settings such as the schedule, grading scheme and annotation colours

Enrol or remove students, or edit student accounts Message students in the course Export the course, or export quizzes, results and grades Re-teach or clone the course Copy learning modules or rubrics into or out of the course Save your questions to their own question bank See your question banks at all Share modules publicly or manage class join codes Delete or end the course, or clear its trash Invite another co-instructor

The pattern behind the second column is that nothing leaves the course and nothing changes the course as an object. Messaging is not included in this first release: course conversations are a private thread between you and each student, including everything written before your colleague joined.

Whose account pays

Everything inside the course is billed to you, the owner, whoever does the work:

• AI credits for grading, matching and generation come from your monthly allowance, not your colleague's.
• File storage for anything they upload counts against your course storage, not theirs.
• Your credit history shows who ran each AI task, so a busy month is always traceable.
• The course does not count against their own limits. An invited course never uses one of a Free teacher's active-course slots, because they do not own it.

If a subscription lapses

If your Pro subscription lapses, nothing is deleted and nobody is removed. Every co-instructor drops to read-only in the course: they can still open it and see everything, and they cannot make changes. Reactivating Pro restores their access immediately, with no new invitation and nothing to set up again. Your colleague is never shown your billing status and is never prompted to pay for that.

If a colleague's own Pro lapses, and they are not the one using your free place, they drop to read-only in the same way until they have Pro again or the place is free for them. Their notice says that editing needs their own ProfDesk Pro and links to it.

If the colleague holding your free place takes their own Pro, the place is free for somebody else straight away, and they carry on as a paying colleague. If nobody takes the place and they later stop paying, they hold it again without a new invitation. If somebody else has taken it, they are read-only until they have Pro again.

Who cannot be a co-instructor

The same person cannot hold two roles in one course. ProfDesk refuses the link in both directions:

• Somebody enrolled as a student in that course cannot be invited as its co-instructor.
• Somebody observing a student in that course cannot be invited as its co-instructor.
• An existing co-instructor cannot later join that same course by class code, or be invited as an observer of a student in it.

The same person can, of course, be a student in one of your courses and a co-instructor on a different one.

Removing a co-instructor, or leaving a course

Either side can end the arrangement, from the same Co-instructor card in Course Settings. You click Remove, and they click Leave Course.

• Access ends immediately, on their very next page.
• Their work stays in the course. Grades they entered, feedback they wrote, modules they published, files and questions they added all remain, still attributed to them.
• The free place frees up once the colleague holding it no longer co-teaches any of your courses, or takes their own ProfDesk Pro. Removing them from one course does not free it while they are still on another.

An invitation that has been sent but not yet accepted can be withdrawn the same way, before it is used.