Ascend

The policy everyone signed for. Now find out who actually read it.

Ascend turns documents you already have into a course people can take: modules, lessons and a test, written solely from the files you assign to it. Publish it to your profile and anyone with the link can sit it — contractors, new starters, franchisees, resellers, customers — with an email address and no account to create. You see who passed, and which questions people keep getting wrong.

You already wrote the course. It just looks like a PDF.

The handbook exists. The standard operating procedure exists. The safety brief, the data-retention policy, the onboarding pack — they all exist, as a PDF somebody emails and everybody files.

What is missing is the twenty minutes it would take to turn that PDF into something a person actually works through, and the test at the end that tells you whether any of it landed. So it never gets made. The document goes out, an acknowledgement comes back, and the acknowledgement is the only evidence anyone has — which is evidence that a file was opened, not that a person understood it.

Ascend closes that gap in the place the documents already live. Open a project, choose the files, and it writes the outline, the lessons and the questions from them. What comes out is a course, on your public profile, that anyone can take from a link.

  • It starts from what you already wrote. No course-authoring tool to learn, no curriculum to design, no second copy of the truth to keep in step with the first.
  • One project, one course, one set of sources. Assign different documents to different courses — and to individual tests within a course — and nothing leaks between them.
  • Editable all the way down. Every module, lesson and question is yours to rewrite, reorder or delete. The generation is a first draft with your material in it, not a black box.
Ascend · Data retention, for contractors
Modules
4
from 3 documents
Lessons
13
written
Questions
20
in the test
Taken
37
28 passed
publishedWhat counts as a recordmodule 1 · 3 lessons
sourcedHow long we keep thingsRetention-Policy-v4.pdf
draftWhen a client asks for deletionnot written yet

Written solely from the documents you assign — and that is the whole point.

This is the whole feature, and it is the reason to use it rather than a chatbot. A compliance course written half from your retention policy and half from what a model believes about retention policies is worse than no course at all — because it is confidently wrong in exactly the places nobody would think to check.

Grounding enforced in code

Every lesson and question traces back to one of your assigned documents, checked before it is saved. This is a rule applied to what comes back, not an instruction the model is trusted to follow; it is a check applied to what comes back.

It waits for your sources

Generation with no documents is turned down before a single model call is made — rather than quietly falling back on general knowledge. It is why every Generate button stays greyed out until you have assigned something, and why it tells you so.

Your sources, and only yours

It draws on exactly what you switched on — your documents, in your project, and those alone. The list of what a course was written from is on the course.

An email address. That is the whole sign-up.

The reason internal training does not reach contractors, franchisees or customers is almost never the training. It is the account.

Somebody has to be provisioned, licensed, invited, chased, reset and eventually removed — and for a forty-minute course taken once, that work costs more than the course is worth. So the course goes out as a PDF instead, and nobody finds out what happened to it.

A published Ascend course lives on your public profile. You send a link. The person reads the lessons one at a time, gives a name and an email, sits the test, and gets their result on the screen and in their inbox. There is no password, no invitation, no seat to buy back, and nothing for you to clean up afterwards.

  • Multiple choice, true/false, and short answer. Short answers are marked on meaning rather than on an exact string, so a right answer typed differently is still right.
  • You set the pass mark and how many attempts they get. When the attempts are gone the page says so, rather than offering a button that would be refused.
  • Answers stay hidden unless you publish them. By default a result says which questions were wrong and not what the right answer was — and says that plainly, instead of looking broken.
yourprofile · Data retention — question 7 of 20
answeredA client asks for their data to be deleted…choice
selectedConfirm identity, then action within 30 days
Delete immediately on request
Refer to the retention schedule and do nothing
Answered
7/20
pass mark 70%
Account needed
No
name and email

Two things you’ll know by Friday that you don’t know today.

Who has actually taken it — and which parts of your own document nobody understood.

Who passed, and when

A list of everyone who has sat it, their score, their best attempt and the date. Exportable, and yours to remove a person from.

The question that trips everyone up

Per-question difficulty across everyone who has taken it. A question two thirds of people fail is usually not a hard question — it is a paragraph in the source document that does not say what you thought it said.

Where a taker stands, told carefully

If you turn cohort results on, each person is shown the average, the spread and their standing in plain words — “above two thirds of the people who have taken this” — rather than a bare percentile.

Cohort results unlock once five people have taken it. Not a rounded figure, not a softened one. With three takers, an average plus your own score is arithmetic that names the other two. Each person counts once, at their best attempt, so one determined retaker cannot become the distribution — and no taker is ever named to another taker.

Straight talk about what your certificate proves.

Worth being exact about, because the gap between “we can show people took this” and “we can show people are certified” is the kind of gap that only becomes visible in an audit.

Ascend records that a person entering a particular name and email address answered these questions, this way, on this date. That is a real and useful record, and for a great many things — an internal policy, a contractor briefing, a product refresher, a franchise standard — it is exactly the record you want. It is not an accredited qualification, and it does not verify that the person at the keyboard is who they say they are. If your obligation is a regulated certification with proctoring and an accrediting body behind it, this is not that, and we would rather say so here than have you find out later.

Early access, and it works in your favour. Ascend is complete enough to build a real course on and publish it today, and it moves fast. What you ask for at this stage is what ships next — the moment to shape a product rather than inherit one.

The Hub is ready. Your invitation is one sentence away.

We build alongside a small, deliberately chosen group of researchers and teams — close enough that what you ask for tends to ship. Tell us what you research, and we'll open the door.

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