Cohorts are groups that allow you to organize users site-wise. They serve multiple purposes:
- You can use cohort to represent a group by role, function or department, and then all an administrator of that cohort to view its members in reports. For example, if you'd like the Volunteer Administrator to be able to run the compliance report but only for volunteers, you could create a "volunteer cohort", set the Volunteer Administrator as the administrator of that cohort, and set volunteers as members of that cohort.
- Once users are members of a cohort, they can easily be enrolled in a course using the "Cohort synch" enrollment plugin, which, as the name suggests, synchronizes cohort membership with course enrollment. (Although if the course is mandatory for these users, you should be using programs instead of the cohort synch plugin.)