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Hey all! Wondering how you use learning plans and manage them when there’s updates (primarily new courses added).

We have changes often, but when we create new courses in learning plans, our completion reporting drops -- and that even affects deactivated/terminated employees. We are in a company where we often have attorney general inquiries that queries all of our training and records, and when we have a terminated employee enrolled in a course AFTER their term date, that just looks bad. We also have people that don’t necessarily need to take new content from their onboarding programs (i.e., a couple years into employment) but if we add a new course, they are no longer complete. 

Do you create new learning plans on a certain cadence? Do you unenroll deactivated employees from the learning plans, but retain their course information? 

Help!!! 

So a combination of strategies gets applied over here for a variety of reasons. 

For major changes, think of it like an annual/bi-annual learning review with heavy curriculum change, a new learning plan gets created and we demark the old vs. new based on a cut off date.

Next, sometimes its the matter of adding a new course(s) that are replacing an old course, but the old course needs to exist, so it is not just swapping content, so equivalencies get discussed if possible which solves the old people suddenly dropping percentage, but it has to be okay they are marked complete in that course too.

Then, deactivated users get filtered out of the reports so that that confusion does not slip in. In some cases they are actively removed from the lp’s, but not always, only when it has to be 100% accurate and usually after recording/logging a point in time report before the change.

Then there’s the easiest, people are enrolled but new content is added and they all need to do it, just add it in.


So a combination of strategies gets applied over here for a variety of reasons. 

For major changes, think of it like an annual/bi-annual learning review with heavy curriculum change, a new learning plan gets created and we demark the old vs. new based on a cut off date.

Next, sometimes its the matter of adding a new course(s) that are replacing an old course, but the old course needs to exist, so it is not just swapping content, so equivalencies get discussed if possible which solves the old people suddenly dropping percentage, but it has to be okay they are marked complete in that course too.

Then, deactivated users get filtered out of the reports so that that confusion does not slip in. In some cases they are actively removed from the lp’s, but not always, only when it has to be 100% accurate and usually after recording/logging a point in time report before the change.

Then there’s the easiest, people are enrolled but new content is added and they all need to do it, just add it in.

Thanks! I think we will do a blended approach of what you’re describing -- major content changes quarterly or twice a year will create new learning plans, and then for small changes we will push out to everyone regardless of completion status! 


@gfenton  We also remove deactivated users from course/LP enrollments if they are just Subscribed or InProgress. We do leave Complete status.

We also use the “generational” approach that @Bfarkas described. Our general schema is that we use catalogs to hold LPs and courses, and if there is a new course, we’ll publish it first to just the catalog. Then periodically we go thru and clean out all of the “users who abandoned” from the LP, and then create a new generation of the LP that includes all of the original LP courses + the courses that were added. If necessary, we’ll move some learners from the original LP over to the new LP.

One thing you do have to watch out for is whether the two LPs share training materials. If yes, you’ll get automatic completions, which may or may not be desirable. We solved that problem by uploading the training material a 2nd time (or not putting the training material into the Central Repository)


We have learning plans that we add new courses to a few times per year, so we don’t create new learning plans - we just add to the existing ones.

However, it IS a problem that the system enrolls deactivated users into the new courses, and we can’t unenroll them. That creates a huge skew in the reporting numbers. 

Add to that there is no clean way to unenroll deactivated users from a learning plan. We don’t have the same functionality to manage users as we do with individual courses. That’s an issue.


This is also a pain point for us! We would love to not create a new learning plan, but adding in a new course is affecting our data greatly and we do not want to remove deactivated users from the data either. Would love to be able to give learners credit for the learning plan still at 100% as a prompt when adding in a new course. Thank you!


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