How do you archive courses?

@Bkatzman There are a couple of other things to consider, assuming that you use the platform in the same way

1. Marking the course in some manner as “retired” … simply using Under Maintenance is confusing because a new course can be under maintenance while you are developing it. I use ‘z_’ at the beginning of the course name/code so that when I sort the courses in Course Management, I can get retired courses out of the way
2. If you use the Central Repository … marking the training materials in the CR as retired is also important, especially if they are retired because they are out of date. I use the same approach
3. I also use Categories to put segment out the retired courses/CR content

I wanted to tell you something that happened to us as well.  We started unenrolling users from our retired courses as we were also trying to archive the users and I caused some major issues with the system.  Some of them were over thousands of users enrolled/in progress/completed.  I logged a Support ticket and they had to abort my background jobs - I was receiving no background jobs being completed.  

They supposedly have fixed this bug and it should be in the next release.

I honestly wanted to give you a heads up if you start to do this.  I don’t want you caught up with this situation I’m still trying to dig out of .

I also use a “retired” category as well as under maintenance.

Hi @monica.cheek ! Thanks for all of this information! My current method to maintain course history on the users’ profile (and to be able to report on it later) is to archive enrollment and unenroll them en masse, so this is super concerning!

We use a similar approach that I learned from other users here on the Community. We put the course “Under Maintenance”, clean out training materials (which if not used in any other courses we move to a superadmin-only “Retired Materials Course” in case we need to access them in the future) and use Course Additional Fields to flag the course as “retired” with a note as to why, and sometimes when. We also make sure to remove the course from any catalogs and learning plans. We maintain all enrollments; we haven’t experimented with doing the archived enrollment on retired courses yet, that’s an interesting idea! The main downside to our current method is that the course isn’t auto-hidden from users in their My Courses and Learning Plans so it’ll show with a padlock on it. A user would have to hide it on their own to “get rid” of it. There is an existing Idea (once that area of the Community is turned back on) with hundreds of votes asking Docebo to give us a REAL archive/retire process for courses that covers the wishlist in your originl post. I really hope they do it sometime soon, I was bummed when I didn’t see it anywhere on their roadmap.

@JEntis 

...use Course Additional Fields to flag the course as “retired” with a note as to why, and sometimes when.

What a great idea!

@KMallette thanks! I can’t take credit though, another community member gave me that idea :) It’s worked very well for us because I can use the additional field as a filter column and see vital info quickly about retired courses.

This was super detailed and super helpful. Thanks @JEntis 

I add OFFLINE_ to the front of all courses that I archive so that in lists and so on they are easy to see.

I move the course out of active catalogues into one called ARCHIVED.

I edit the description of the course and add a note up front in BOLD AND RED to say this course is archived.

I set the course to Under Maintenance (but agree another status of archived or retired is needed) so that I can see in the course filter view published vs not …

I’ve added an additional course field that is called “Archived Notes” and write in there why and who etc.. so there is some context for anyone looking at it in the future.

Thanks for the details @jckemv! Super helpful!

For the course code I put a dash RET, and then put retired and the date in () after the course name and then go to Advanced Settings > Catalog Options and make sure that under Course Self-Enrollment is the first radio button “Self-enrolments are not available”.

Very helpful!  Thanks for sharing!!!! @jckemv