Described is a technology in which a set of objects represent educational entities of an educational model, with relationships between objects. For example, a course object instance may have a relationship with a task instance and a user instance (such as representing a student). Other objects may include user credentials objects, group objects, degree program objects, course plan objects, institution objects, school objects, and/or department objects. The set of objects may be pre-defined and maintained in a persistent storage; this pre-defined set may be extended with an extended object that has relationships with pre-defined objects. The educational entities of an object model may be maintained in rows of a table, with each row having a field that identifies which entity is represented by that row. The table is accessed to determine relationships between an instantiated object for an entity and at least one other instantiated object for another entity.