Bulk Course Updates

If all you need to do is put them “under maintenance”, then the simplest way would be to go to the course management page, and enable the Published column (you’ll probably have to disable another column to display it, and can reorder the columns as you wish by drag/dropping).  Then do a search like you normally would for the courses you want.  You would then just click the checkboxes on the courses you want to un-publish (make under maintenance).

The other solutions I can think of involve using an external automation tool.

Oh that’s a creative approach! I like it thanks I will try that.

We have been removing them from all catalogs and channels when we retire courses.  We also set up two top-level categories in Course Management - one for ACTIVE courses and one for INACTIVE, so once we retire a course fully, we also move it from it’s current category under the ACTIVE one to the INACTIVE category.  We also put INACTIVE: at the start of the course title, just to make it clear to any users that had already been enrolled in it that the course is no longer being used (since we only have an Under Maintenance status to use instead of something like Deactivated).

As ​@elamast stated, if you need to mark multiple courses as Under Maintenance at one time, you can just use the status column in Course Management to quickly click through the courses you need to deactivate.  Unfortunately, we have not found a direct way within Course Management to move courses to different categories without having to go into each one individually.