Archive Enrollments - can someone provide a use case?

These options depend on how you manage the course...If for instance, you are archiving a course that need to be completed 1/ calendar year, you can easily archive all records at the end of the calendar year and re-enroll them all since it is a required course. Resetting the tracking data in this case would be necessary in order for them to be able to retake the course for the start.

Then you have other scenarios like the one we use for ILT courses...today, users can only attend a single session for any course. If you are running quarterly sessions, you would need to archive those records before the users could re-enrol. That said, for ILT, I would not necessarily re-enrol them since it would be left to the user to decide whether they woudl want to attend again and perhaps choose the same ILT course or another.

These are just 2 examples of how we have used archiving but there are more examples…

Another that comes to mind is to keep track of failed course attempts. Since you can archive a course in any state, you can actually archive this that remain in progress as a result of failing a course thereby giving them another go at the course, In this case I would recommend archive and re-enrol + resetting the tracking data…

So you really need to think about how the course is managed and the impact to users based on the action you plan to take, etc.

If you have a specific use case, it might be easier to address your questions.

@lrnlab Thank you for the information! I understand and do see value in the “Archive and Re-Enroll” but I am still a bit unclear on “Archive and Unenroll.”

(Please let me know if I am understanding/summarizing correctly)

• The Archive and Reenroll works for ILT Courses but not for ILT sessions. In the ILT scenario you mention, if you chose to Archive and Re-Enroll the Learner for the ILT Course, the Learner would be re-enrolled at the Course level and receive an enrollment email (if enabled), which would hopefully prompt the Learner at some point to log in and register/enroll for one of the upcoming refresher sessions. But if you select Archive and Unenroll, the Learner would need to search and find the ILT course, re-enroll in the course, and then enroll in the session they want to attend. So, if I am understanding correctly, both archive/re-enroll and archive/unenroll functionalities seem similar here except archive/unenroll forces a few extra steps for the Learner. 
• I considered the 2nd scenario you mention regarding in progress/incomplete enrollments, but I am still having a hard time understanding why you would want to essentially “block” a Learner from accessing the content (summarizing/paraphrasing what is in the documentation) if the Learner is in progress, even if they failed, through the Archive and Unenroll tool. If you needed to limit a Learner’s access to content after a failed attempt, could that not be configured in the course settings? (i.e., the course would lock if the user fails)

I don’t have any specific use cases for the Archive and Unenroll tool currently, but because it is an available option when archiving, I wanted to post here to see if anyone else does have a use case for it that I am just missing!

Thanks again for the reply!

Ryan 

@mrrippy82 Just today I am using it extensively. :-)

A couple of use cases where this is a tool in the process, not just the reason to use

• Complete removal of expired content from learners dashboards
• Complete remove of content related to expired Learning Plans/Catalogs
• Complete unlinking of expired courses from training materials stored in the Central Repository

I archive content in stages, over the course of a couple of years. Initially, it’s just getting the content off dashboards and out of learning plans (bullet #2), but eventually, I want to further reduce the content’s presence in the LMS (bullet #1, bullet #3). We have other tools/processes for storing retired course content, so the need for me to keep a lot of data decreases over time.

Now that I have the Archive/Unenroll tool, I am going through previously retired courses/LPs/catalogs, and doing that deeper level of retiring. I am removing training materials from the course shells and archiving the enrollments (bullet #1).  Many of these LPs have several “generations” to them (where I have added/removed courses, or just simply redesigned the whole LP), and so I want to avoid inadvertent assignments to anything other than the most current LP.

For critical LPs, I have a separate “marker” course that I ADD INTO the LP that represents the completion of the LP. So where I may have had 20 courses in the LP while it was active, when I archive it, it contains one course (no content, just a placeholder). Any one who completed the LP while it was active gets enrolled into this “marker” course. In the end the retired LP will always contain a list of learners who completed it.

The the case of a single course, I am fine with the archived enrollments as those do appear on the learner record.

In the case of bullet #3, my Central Repository will show me which training materials are not assigned to courses, so I can move them out of the category structure. It will also keep me from inadvertently updating training materials on a retired course.

Hope that helps, and I’m happy to answer any further questions...just DM me 🙂

Another use case for archive an unenroll is with required training by role. 
When using groups and enrollment rules to deploy role-based training, the users can join/leave groups when conditions are met and no longer met respectively. However, there is no auto-unenroll. 
We use archive and unenroll when users no longer are required to complete the training and want it off of their to do list. By archiving we preserve the current status for accurate records. 

A belated thanks to @KMallette for the insight and how you use the tool. And thank you @dianex.gomez for the additional use case. Very helpful information and scenarios I had not considered!

Hi ​@KMallette - Thanks for your explanation here. We onboarded with Docebo a few months ago, and we’re now at the point where we have some courses that are no longer valid/relevant. We want to sunset these courses completely, which feels similar to bullets #1 & #3 in your example. Would you be willing to share your “order of operations” for how you sunset content?

In my mind, I need to get it off learner dashboards for anyone who was once enrolled, while also preventing anyone from enrolling in the future. It sounds like you’ve got some experience with this, so I’d love to understand your process so that I’m not leaving any stones unturned.

Additional question here: My understanding is that for a course to appear on reporting, it has to be in a catalog that is resourced to the power user running the report. In order for that to happen, even if we unpublish a course, we can’t move the course out of catalogs accessible to the power user, or they won’t see it when reporting. Thought learners can’t enroll in an unpublished course, a power user can enroll them still. Thoughts?

I’m also interested in the order of operations for archiving courses/enrollments.

​@ariel.zimmerman ​@shanejacques So sorry I missed this request a while back Shane… I’ve been only part-time in the community while I was between jobs. Let’s see if I can recall the steps. I apologize if this doesn’t seem very complete information. Tbh, I think I’ve forgotten much of what I did. ALSO… many of the things that I did are LIKELY OUTDATED because of improvements in the platform around LPs and archiving enrollments. I’d strongly recommend immersing yourself in those topics before implementing anything I did in the past.

• Getting content off the dashboard - I just simply made the course inactive, and then I edited the course code (add a z_ to the front of the code so that it sorts to the bottom of the list of courses) and course title (add Retired - to the front of the title, again so it sorts well). Depending on the age and continued relevance of the content, I either removed the enrollments OR used the enrollment archive function (once that was available in the platform). In this case, all reporting information was lost, so I usually ran a “final report” and archived it somewhere.
• Retired LPs - 1. Created a ‘marker’ course with no content, but is just titled in an appropriate way for your operations. I think I used something like “Completed Generation 3 LP”, and then added that to the LP so that all of the enrollees would get that course and it would appear in their User Summary. Then I had to make sure that course was completed for everyone who was complete in the LP. I used reports to get some of this information. 2. After the marker course was completed in everyone’s account, then I could remove the retired courses from the LP, which also removes them from the user’s dashboard. 
  • The other sidebar topic to retiring LPs comes if there are ‘new versions’ of the same LP that are still active. For example, Generation 3 of the LP is getting retired, but Generation 4 is now available. I didn’t want anyone who had completed Gen 3 to complete the content of Gen 4.  This was a challenge that I was trying to address when I left the company, but I was headed towards using different catalogs/pages
• Dealing with learners who enrolled in a retired LP but never started, or who started but never finished … these guys are buggers to deal with :-) They don’t get a marker course. I used a couple of approaches to get the individual users out of the individual courses. I think I used a report to find those who weren’t complete, and then unenrolled them from the LP (including the courses regardless of whether they had completed the course or not). I also built a process using APIs but I don’t have access to what I built any longer.
• Training materials - In the CR,  I unassigned the material from the retired course, and when it was no longer used in any course, I edited the code and title with the z_ and Retired - following the same practice I used for courses. Then I also created a “retired content” folder and assigned the course to that folder.

​@ariel.zimmerman Regarding your additional question.
“Additional question here: My understanding is that for a course to appear on reporting, it has to be in a catalog that is resourced to the power user running the report. In order for that to happen, even if we unpublish a course, we can’t move the course out of catalogs accessible to the power user, or they won’t see it when reporting. Thought learners can’t enroll in an unpublished course, a power user can enroll them still. Thoughts?”

Reporting is depending on visibility for your power users. You can provide visibility to courses via catalogs, categories, or named courses (not recommended). If you are not using categories for your users, it is a great way to provide visibility for power users who need visibility to courses across catalogs. I have also seen a retired catalog used for continued access for admins and no visibility for learners. 

Please note, removing courses from catalogs does not hide them from view for users who are enrolled, they will still see them in “my courses and learning plans” and on their transcripts. When I retire a course, I return the status to “In Maintenace” and preface the title with “RETIRED:” This lets me keep the usage history and lets the user know that the course is not coming back. I do remove them from catalogs so other users don’t see the clutter. I also append _retired to my course code because I use codes in reporting for filters and other data sorting.

I did ramble a bit, I hope you find some value in it.

All good, ​@KMallette! Great minds must think alike because the steps we developed for this process are nearly identical. Nevertheless, I appreciate you closing the loop. Hope the job transition has been smooth!