Retiring Courses and Learning Plans

Sean
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Interested to know how people deal with courses and learning plans that are no longer needing to be active?

For example a course that is no longer running, or a learning plan that is no longer needed (or superseded by another).

You can delete a course, but then all the associated completion records are deleted too, and they are still required for reporting purposes.  Plus it might be handy for learners to still see the course completion information in their My Courses page.  We considered putting it back from Published to Under Maintenance, but that seems a bit messy.  On a previous LMS we were able to ‘retire’ courses so they were no longer visible to any learners, but still on the system for reporting purposes.

Do others simply take the courses out of any visible catalogs?

Any thoughts on this gratefully received :-)

Sean

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KMallette
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@Sean A question I’ve been working on for 3 years :-) My biggest challenge is that I use “generations” of learning plans … the LP changes generations because courses are added/removed. When I change a generation, I completely rebuild the courses using new course numbers (even if I use the same training materials) and move learners into the most current course and LP.

After an LP is no longer used, there are two stages that I follow

Stage 1: Getting it off the dashboards so no one else can use it.

  1. Remove from Catalogs
  2. Unpublish Courses
  3. Move users to the current version of the LP/Course
  4. Check Pages to make certain that the current LP is listed

Stage 2: Several months later, I further retire the LP and courses using these steps. The benefit of this stage is that learner completions are maintained while reducing the amount of space taken on their User Personal Summary by the list of retired courses.

  1. Create Group/Report that collects all users from all LPs used by the courses. Check Content Management > Learning Plan for a list. Export the report
  2. Create an equivalent course.
  3. Add equivalent to the retiring LP. Let the LP update so that everyone gets enrolled into the equivalent. (3-4 minutes)
  4. Remove COURSES from LP. Wait for the LP to update (5-10 minutes)
  5. Using Content Management, remove LEARNERS from ENROLLMENTS
  6. Wait overnight or do a data pool update
  7. Export the same report again and compare the number of records. Should be the same. If not, use VLookups to figure out which users broke, and then fix.
  8. Post the final spreadsheet to an archive.

Hope this make sense and gives you food for thought,

KM

KMallette/Viasat, Inc.
lrnlab
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HI @Sean we tend to simply remove them from user catalogues but maintain the enrolments for historical reporting. Since Docebo does not currently support multiple completions for the same course, our annual courses are duplicated each year to get stared and the previous versions are left as published but not in any catalogues. In this state,, users can review the old course if they wish )from their personal summary). If you place the course under maintenance, users cannot access the course.

It’s really about choosing a path that best fits your needs as there is no real “archive” feature. There are several ideas you might want to vote on though.

 

Sean
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WOW @KMallette!

Thanks so much for such a comprehensive response on this.  It sounds like you’ve really thought about what your process needs to be and how best to achieve the best results.

It really does seem to be quite a faff though doesn’t it?

It’s certainly giving me something to think about, and how we might use it going forward.

Thanks again! ✨

Sean
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Hi @lrnlab

Thanks for your perspective on this question, and for clarifying that if we put the courses ‘under maintenance’ that they would not be accessible by learners.

It’s good to hear how you are dealing with courses that you no longer want to be enrolled upon.  I did wonder if the ‘removing from catalogs’ would be the best solution.

Thanks for providing the link to the ‘idea’, I’ve upvoted it too now (although it’s now 5 years old and even though it has a lot of upvotes, it seems not to be getting attention!).

All the best

Sean

lrnlab
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Hopefully it’ll make it’s way in the product soon...am guessing once they add the ability to track multiple completions for a single course, it will open up other options.

L
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@Sean, We’ve just been unpublishing the course when we are no longer using it.  That preserves all the history.  If it’s a whole learning plan that has to be removed, we just remove it from displaying in a catalog.

I would add that a way to cancel an ILT course without having to delete it would be great too!

 

lrnlab
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@lyndagutman think the option to cancel an ILT is coming soon...let’s hope.

L
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@lrnlab That would be awesome!  Thanks for letting me know.

Bfarkas
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@lyndagutman think the option to cancel an ILT is coming soon...let’s hope.

Can’t wait for this!

lrnlab
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Please don't quote me on this one as it was seen in the roadmap but we all know this is never set in stone...lol

Bfarkas
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Please don't quote me on this one as it was seen in the roadmap but we all know this is never set in stone...lol

Would never, in the scheme things, everything is “soon” anyways :) 

lrnlab
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Yup until I see it “planning” you never know for sure

Bfarkas
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Yup until I see it “planning” you never know for sure

Ha! Until I see it in next months sandbox release I don’t trust it… :)

lrnlab
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indeed.

Sean
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Is there someone at Docebo we can @ to give us some advice on whether this is imminent? 😊

Sean
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Ciao @damiano.colombo and @nicolo malinverno, I don’t think this request would fall under your area of responsibility, but do you know a colleague at Docebo who could advise whether this feature is going to be available soon?

Thanks very much!

Sean

L
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I’m late to the party, again, but I have a similar question. How do I archive a learning plan, and not make a mess.

  1. I want to be able to report on who was enrolled in the learning plan and their status, even those that didn’t complete it.
  2. I don’t want the unfinished learning plan and courses to show for the user on a course widget filtered to incomplete.
  3. I do want the learning plan to show in the All courses and learning plan page or user summary, even if they didn’t complete it.

Any ideas?

D
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I’m late to the party, again, but I have a similar question. How do I archive a learning plan, and not make a mess.

  1. I want to be able to report on who was enrolled in the learning plan and their status, even those that didn’t complete it.
  2. I don’t want the unfinished learning plan and courses to show for the user on a course widget filtered to incomplete.
  3. I do want the learning plan to show in the All courses and learning plan page or user summary, even if they didn’t complete it.

Any ideas?

 @lhubbard I realize this is late but I don’t see a response so… Are you archiving the course too or just the learning plan? If the former, you can unpuplish the courses as suggested earlier. If the latter, removing the learning plan from catlogs will accomplish #1, but not sure the impact to #3. Not sure what to do with #2.

L
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@dianex.gomez Here’s what I ended up with:

  • I left the learning plans in place.
  • Deactivated any enrollment rules.
  • Marked anyone enrolled and not complete as ‘suspended’ enrollment status
  • We are using prefiltered widgets that only show In Progress and Not started on their task page, so the suspended status removes that from the list.

 

These LPs were never in a catalog so that was not a concern. I do have to remember that the suspended status in reporting means that they did not complete it before the LP was archived.

For # 2, Yes they can change the filter on the widget and mess that up, but so far I haven’t had any complaints.

 

D
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@lhubbard  “Marked anyone enrolled and not complete as ‘suspended’ enrollment status” Is this for the learning plan or the courses? I can see how to set the course enrollment status to ‘suspended’ but how do you set the learning plan enrollment status to ‘suspeneded’?

BTW, I was in this thread today because I am retiring my first learning plan and associated courses and wanted to see options and make sure I don’t miss anything. I forgot all about enrollment rules, thanks for that reminder!

L
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@dianex.gomez  The suspended status is at the course level.

S
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@lrnlab When placing the course under maintenance, are you utilizing an API call, changing them manually, or something else?  We have a large number that we need to remove from visbility and are trying to avoid manual efforts.

lrnlab
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@lrnlab When placing the course under maintenance, are you utilizing an API call, changing them manually, or something else?  We have a large number that we need to remove from visbility and are trying to avoid manual efforts.

usually manually as we don't have that many at once.

Did you know you can do a mass action to place them under maintenance/publish?

  1. Select all the course you want to switch
  2. on the bottom right of the page, select Choose Action > Change Status

 

  1.  

S
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@lrnlab When placing the course under maintenance, are you utilizing an API call, changing them manually, or something else?  We have a large number that we need to remove from visbility and are trying to avoid manual efforts.

usually manually as we don't have that many at once.

Did you know you can do a mass action to place them under maintenance/publish?

  1. Select all the course you want to switch
  2. on the bottom right of the page, select Choose Action > Change Status

 

  1.  

@lrnlab - thank you for highlighting this feature, as I had forgotten about it!  As diverse as our courses are, though, I’m not sure we would be able to apply filters to easily isolate them (and would find ourselves manually searching and selecting them).  If it turns out we can easily filter, I do like being able to move them to “under maintenance” all at once!  Thank you again!

alena.kowalski
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I know this post is old but just wanted to post what we have done in case anyone is coming across this in the future in a similar situation and looking for guidance! Our platform is external/customer facing so here is what we wanted to achieve when sunsetting a course and learning plan: 

  • Not allow the retired courses be visible to those that have enrolled or not finished the course due to the content being outdated.
  • Allow users who have completed the course or Learning Plan are able to see it in their My Activities.
  • Have historical data for our records

There isn’t a perfect way nor a one-size-fits-all when retiring a course in Docebo, but here are the steps we did:

  1. Remove courses and learning plan from any and all catalogs 
  2. Pull report of all historical enrollments/completions using new reports
  3. Remove all courses from the learning plan, leaving the empty shell
  4. Unenroll all users from the learning plan
  5. Unenroll all “in progress” and “enrolled” users from the course 
  6. Expire the course - set end date in Time Options
  7. Created an “Archive” folder in the CLOR and moved the training material to “Archived”

Other than that we left the courses as-is, and left the empty learning plan.

 

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