Adding a retired course option to published/unpublished section of Ethos

We’d like to have a place to put retired courses. Right now, we only have the option of storing courses as published or unpublished. We’d like to use the unpublished area to store courses in development and not have them mixed up with courses that have been retired. Marking retired courses as unpublished creates quite a few problems with redirects and links to outside entities.

Does anyone else have this issue or a possible solution?

Hi Lauren, we normally just let the courses expire and leave them as is. In the event we don’t want a course to be visible in listings we make sure to set them as not visible in the calendar or catalog from the course settings view.
We haven’t had an issue with allowing a course to stay past its expiration date though. Are you encountering issues on your end?

Agreed, we normally put in the expiration date and then they will not show in our search or course catalog.

Curious why you want to do that. . .the advantages you see.

Susan Benysh
Mayo Clinic

We do entirely online courses and would like to have 3 categories: live, unpublished, and retired. Right now, when we retire a course, it is stored in the unpublished area. We’d like to use the unpublished area only for courses in development and have a dedicated place to store a course once it’s retired. Over the years, our list of retired courses has become quite long and we often have multiple courses in development–I don’t like mixing up these 2 categories of courses.

At times, we’ve lost track of retired courses because they don’t show in search or in the course catalogue if we use the “expire” function to retire a course… The Ethos system is complicated enough to manage without having to go search for where a retired course has landed. Having a 3rd option for categorizing courses (retired) would be a big help.

I see! This makes sense, and guess we have a similar issue. We have a few courses that expire yearly, with new iterations every year, that have the same name. We have not been using Ethos for so long that it’s a complex problem to manage, but I do see it becoming an issue down the road. We have to go by course ID to make sure. So far we keep a manual log of all our courses outside of ethos, and a hyperlink to each course - that has helped - but a retired course option makes sense.
Thank you for explaining this!

Yes, we didn’t have this problem in the 1st couple of years with Ethos but after a while it’s become an irritating problem. That, along with the significant issue of a user not being able to repeat a live course–that’s been a major headache that affects our sales and customer service. We have a number of state-mandated courses–most require renewal every 2-3 years with various state agencies. For a number of reasons, people often need to repeat one of the state-mandated courses (new job, profession-specific requirement, working at more than 1 facility). The Ethos system doesn’t allow a person to repeat a course. We’ve brought this up with Ethos several times and the only solution they can offer is to clone the course. The cloning mechanism is very clunky and time-consuming and leads back to the point of this post–namely, how to keep track of retired courses–or worse–needing to keep 2 or more copies of a course live with slightly different names so a person can repeat the course. It’s a nearly impossible issue to manage with the way the Ethos system is set up. I’m very frustrated that Ethos keeps adding all kinds of esoteric functionality but fails to address these key, foundational issues with their LMS.

I want to keep track of all our courses–retired, in production, and live. We often use material from retired courses in new courses. The unpublished area is cluttered up with many retired courses–we’d like unpublished to be only unpublished. We retire courses on a regular basis and need a designated spot for them.

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