Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.hawkings.education/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
TL;DR
A Course is the recipe. A Cohort is the meal you cooked
yesterday. You author the recipe once. You can cook it many times.
Course "Intro to Special Relativity" (the recipe)
├─ Cohort "Fall 2025, Group A" (Tuesday's meal)
├─ Cohort "Fall 2025, Group B" (Tuesday's meal, different table)
└─ Cohort "Spring 2026" (next semester's meal)
What lives where
| Lives on the Course | Lives on the Cohort |
|---|
| Name | Code (e.g. MATH101-FA25-A) |
| Description | Start / end dates |
| Language | Enrolled students |
| Target hours | Assigned teachers |
| AI instructions | Submissions |
| The syllabus tree | Per-student progress |
| Default rubrics | Per-cohort overrides |
cohorts.create({ course_id, copy_overrides: false }).)
When you have just one cohort
Plenty of products only ever need one cohort per course — for example,
a self-paced consumer learning app. The SDK supports that with sugar:
const course = await hk.courses.create({ name: "Photography 101" });
const cohort = course.cohorts[0]; // a default cohort is auto-created
When you have many cohorts
This is where the split pays off. Say you sell a corporate training
course; each customer is a cohort:
for (const customer of customers) {
await hk.cohorts.create({
course_id: "crs_intro_to_security",
name: `${customer.name} — security training`,
code: customer.slug,
starts_at: customer.kickoffDate,
});
}
Anti-patterns
Don’t model “this year” and “last year” as edits to the same Course.
You’ll lose history and break analytics. Create a new Cohort instead.
Don’t model “track A” and “track B” of the same course as separate
Courses. They share a syllabus, share rubrics, share generated
content. Use one Course with two Cohorts and per-cohort overrides.
Don’t create a Course per student. Courses are syllabi. A 1:1
tutoring product is one Course with one Cohort per learner — or a
single Cohort and the right rubric. Talk to us if you’re not sure.