Ekati is written in the vocabulary of a real Cameroonian school: terms, sequences, broadsheets, instalments, roles, access modules. None of those words explain themselves the first time you meet them, and a handbook that assumes you already know them is not a handbook at all. This part is where you look them up.

There are two pages here, and between them they answer the two questions a new user asks most. Vocabulary is the plain-language dictionary of the platform’s words, grouped by where you meet them rather than written as a formal glossary. Accounts and roles says who signs in where: the six roles inside a school, the three that sit outside it, and the person who buys the subscription.

Nothing here is a procedure. If you are trying to do something — take a payment at the counter, publish a term’s results, print a report card — go to the guide written for your audience instead, and come back here when a screen uses a word you do not recognise.

Four groups of words

The dictionary is sorted into the school itself, teaching and assessment, money and selling, and the website. Words travel between screens — a class is a row on a timetable, a column group on a broadsheet and a line in the fee screen — so sorting them by subject rather than by menu explains each word once, in the place you will look for it.

Every entry says what the word is for

Each definition answers three questions: what the thing is, what you do with it, and what it affects. Fee structure is not merely “a price”: it is one price for one class in one academic year, cut into instalments, and almost every other finance screen reads from it. Broadsheet is not merely “a table”: it is the class performance board that decides who is ranked where, and it can only be built once the marks have been submitted.

Some words are Cameroonian, and are not translated

Sequence, Form B and reseat have no honest English equivalent, and schools do not translate them in practice. The dictionary says what each one is rather than inventing a substitute that would be wrong in the other language.

Three doors, and one person may hold two keys

Ekati has three separate front doors. The administration portal is where school staff work: the head of school, the secretary, the bursar, the lecturer, the teacher. The learner portal is what a learner or a parent opens on a phone. The public website is where anybody browses courses, prices and school profiles without an account at all. They are genuinely separate — a head of school who is also a parent signs in to both in the same browser, and neither session disturbs the other.

A role decides the menu, not the rank

Inside the administration portal, what somebody can open is decided by their role. Ekati provides six, and each is a job rather than a level: super administrator, institution administrator, secretary, bursar, lecturer, teacher. A bursar is not junior to a secretary; a bursar simply has a different set of doors. Nobody has to be told what they may not do, because the screen they were not cleared for is not in front of them.

Giving somebody access takes four steps

Create the account, attach the role, let the person set their own password, and tell them which of the three doors to open. A school of thirty will usually have one person who is both secretary and bursar, and giving that one account both roles is a normal arrangement rather than a workaround. The accounts and roles page sets the roles out in full and the steps in order.