Sanity Check - Other best practices for retiring a course

  • 29 November 2022
  • 11 replies
  • 168 views
dklinger
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Userlevel 7
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Hey folks - as we get close to the end of the year, we are going into a curation cycle with our content.

I am guiding my SMEs / catalog owners through using the course tools (in course management) to archive a course: but I am curious if yawl go through any other steps:

  1. put the course into the under maintenance
  2. remove from the current catalog
  3. put into an archived catalog (which does not sit on a page anywheres)

Are there other things you do?

Some things that are out of bounds:

  • I dont want to mess with the name of the course.

But I am open to:

  • Parameterizing the validity for the course to the day it is curated out is the day it is expired.
  • Adding an additional field (not sure of the added value)
  • Change who can enroll a person into the course.

I super wish there was a guide on just this (even though I can understand that one shoe may not fit all).

 

11 replies

NateC
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Hi @dklinger 

This is something I often struggle with, as there are a lot of things that could be easier. But of course we manage where we can.

Here is my usual routine when archiving:

I keep the title & the course code but add ‘xxxxx’ at the beginning of the code & ‘ARCHIVED-’ at the beginning of the name. I have a dedicated ‘!Archive’ Category that only my team has access to, so we drop them there. And, of course the status is changed to ‘Under Maintenance’ (would love an ‘Archived’ designation that includes some cascading attributes like auto-hiding the course from catalogs, but hopefully that becomes a feature before long).

I then add ‘Archived’ to the course tags as well.

I remove the Enrollment Link & change ‘Course Self-Enrollment’ to ‘Self-enrollments are not available’ & ‘Course Visibility in Catalogs’ to ‘Show only to enrolled users’.

Next I remove it from Learning Plans & Catalogs. Now only other Super Admins can see it.

Hopefully there are some ideas in here you can use, I’m always looking for better methods myself.

Annarose.Peterson
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If you have power users who have special visibility to report on certain users, I would make sure that those power users can still see the completion of the course on a User Personal Summary Report. 

Pulling the course out of your normal catalogs can make visibility funky for those power users that maybe have the ability to see all courses in a visible catalog. 

I had run into that a long while back when playing with this and I remember I ended up keeping courses in their original catalog because of visibility issues.

Annarose Peterson (She/Her)
Jill Allen
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Hi @dklinger,

Great topic and post!  As last year came to a close, I created a short training and process for our Power Users as well. This is our process:  

  1. Change Course Status to Under Maintenance.
  2. In Advanced Properties, Change the Category to Archived.  All PU have access to this category. Enter key info in the Course Additional Field we added called Archive Notes:  Year-Month-Day: Brief Note (Initials). Example: 2021-11-30: Replaced with XXX (DE)
  3. Review Enrollments: Remove Subscribed and In Progress.  Even if you remove the course from a catalog, it is still visible in My Courses and Learning Plans.  **If the course is being replaced by another course, PU may want to enroll those that have not completed the old course into the new course first.
  4. Remove Visibility to Learners: Remove from Learning Plans and Catalogs.

Note: If you use the built-in “My Courses and Learning Plans,” the course is still visible and is locked. Using this process, all archived courses would be “Completed.”  I didn’t want to frustrate learners with locked courses still marked as Enrolled or In Progress. 

 

 

rich.schmick
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Userlevel 3

I would add removing the course from any channels as well since Docebo recently added the ability to post a course to a channel. It may be worth adding to your checklist for the future if you’re not currently using this function. 

Bfarkas
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Userlevel 7
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I was going to comment that I get the title not being impacted, but I often add something to the end of the course code to easily search/filter by. This doesn’t impact the user completions and things as much I find.

spotratz
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We also modify the course’s code to have ARCHIVED...when we remember to do that =)

Steven Potratz, MAT
Bfarkas
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Userlevel 7
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We also modify the course’s code to have ARCHIVED...when we remember to do that =)

Ah the memory part. Prior to the course report coming, had basically done all the management of courses and things externally and the code updates were part of the scripts that auto happen in that process. Keep going back and forth on how much of that to disable and how much the new report doesnt help with.

M
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Userlevel 4

@NateC 

The archive (auto hide) would be awesome! We have annual training that has to stay on the learner’s transcript for documentation, but I don’t want the old courses cluttering up their assigned training page. They may need to review the current year’s training, but not the one from 3 years ago that’s now out of date. 

Internally we enroll users manually, as opposed to allowing self-enrollments in catalogs.

tararussell
Rank

Hi @dklinger,

Great topic and post!  As last year came to a close, I created a short training and process for our Power Users as well. This is our process:  

  1. Change Course Status to Under Maintenance.
  2. In Advanced Properties, Change the Category to Archived.  All PU have access to this category. Enter key info in the Course Additional Field we added called Archive Notes:  Year-Month-Day: Brief Note (Initials). Example: 2021-11-30: Replaced with XXX (DE)
  3. Review Enrollments: Remove Subscribed and In Progress.  Even if you remove the course from a catalog, it is still visible in My Courses and Learning Plans.  **If the course is being replaced by another course, PU may want to enroll those that have not completed the old course into the new course first.
  4. Remove Visibility to Learners: Remove from Learning Plans and Catalogs.

Note: If you use the built-in “My Courses and Learning Plans,” the course is still visible and is locked. Using this process, all archived courses would be “Completed.”  I didn’t want to frustrate learners with locked courses still marked as Enrolled or In Progress. 

 

 

 

tararussell
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Are you also removing the enrollments from the learning plans if the courses within a learning plan have been removed from the learning plan.  This message comes up with all users in the learning plan are selected to be deleted?

 

T
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Userlevel 4
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Are you also removing the enrollments from the learning plans if the courses within a learning plan have been removed from the learning plan.  This message comes up with all users in the learning plan are selected to be deleted?

 

If there are no more courses in the learning plan for the user to be enrolled in and it’s an empty shell, there’s not really a reason to keep the learning plan enrollments/shell unless you track the completion of the learning plan itself rather than the individual courses.  If the LP is impossible to complete or no longer has courses associated with it, it can make sense to unenroll them.

 

However, the consequence of unenrolling them is it does remove the completion of the LP from their transcript.  Even with removal from the LP, the transcript will remain intact for the completion of the individual courses as long as they are not unenrolled from associated courses they have completed.

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