Make expired and incomplete activities disappear from a user's Pending Activities List

I posted this back in April 2021

At the time it seemed that I was not the only person experiencing this issue. It has been more than a year and this is still an issue we are having difficulty with, so I am entering it as a feature request/product suggestion.

(oops, posted before I finished typing) The issue is a when a learner does not finish an activity - I think specifically an RSS activity, the activity stays in their Pending Activities list, even if they are closed out and past the expiration date.

This has led to a lot of miscommunication, and manual labor. All our guidelines tell learners they have X days to complete a course, and most are confused when they still see it in their pending list. Most who check will then request for us to unlock, which we obviously can but it’s not preferred. We can’t unenroll the learner because that messes with our RSS reporting numbers, and we are not sure what’s the best way to bypass the completion of the course without awarding credit, other than manually removing each credit awarded.

I have a current ticket in about this issue. For all other activities, once the course end date happens, the course expires and drops off the pending activities list.

But for RSS sessions, this is not the case. I am hoping that once a SERIES expires, the sessions can drop off of the pending activities list, since an individual session does not have a “course end date” - only live course start and end dates, I thought that would be the best course of action.

To test, I backend enrolled myself in a RSS session from 2020 and it showed up on my pending - and I could go in and claim credit. This is a big problem - especially when we have MOC and/or pharmacy credit for the sessions.

Oh, and I don’t see this as a product suggestion, I see this as a bug fix :grin:

I agree! Definitely, a bug fix and one that I feel has been overlooked or missed.

I can confirm on my end the sessions do not disappear when an RSS session expires. I just reviewed a user’s transcript who contacted me about wanting to complete their requirements. Their list of pending activities had 3 years’ worth of incomplete RSS sessions, which are set to expire on Dec, 31 of every year. I had to manually complete each session, then remove each awarded credit for the really past due ones. Very time-consuming!

It would be easier if you could manage a user’s credits directly from their profile page instead of having to visit each individual activity, but that also wouldn’t be a fix for this bug.

We have two clients who need this enhancement. Our issue is not related to RSS.

We are selling access to products for one year from the Purchase Date. If a user has not completed the course when the purchase expiration occurs, the course remains on their Pending Activities list forever. When they try to access it, they get a message saying something about “enrollment expired,” which is meaningless to them. We also have email messages going to them explaining that their access to the course will expire, but even with all that messaging, keeping an expired course in the pending activities list with a confusing error message is causing many support issues.

Ideally, Ethos should create an Expired Courses tab/area where expired courses are listed.

As an short-term, easier alternative, the client should be able to edit the error message, so that it explains to user why the course won’t launch after expiration.

Note that there is another discussion about this dating back to 2018.

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I agree! We posted a request for this several months ago–adding an expired courses section to the live and pending lists. Several people replied in the affirmative but no response from Ethos (yet).

Agree, the “bug” that leaves the series session in a user’s pending indefinitely definitely causes issues. We have sessions (and more) that expire. Our learners are confused and often very frustrated when they visit their pending activities, and the session is expired for credit claim. The user perspective, and frustration, is that if it is listed in their pending, why can they not complete the process? This has been in the community for years, is there nothing on the horizon to correct this? I would think this would be a priority as many users that have shared the issue/concern.

The key problem is that rss sessions DO NOT EXPIRE. I’m all for an expired tab, but as it stands RSS sessions would never move there. The only way to make a session “expire” is to add an access end date to the credit object in the session. We have a lot of RSS that require eval and sometimes test (MOC) so often people text in, are pending, but need to do other things before they can claim credit. The session stays in pending and only after the learner has gone into the course to discover that claiming credit step has expired do they realize they can’t get credit. Really really not good user experience. This is not how any other course works. This needs to be fixed.

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Commenting here so this issue stays in the radar as this is still a major issue.
We are, once again, getting close to the next Medical License renewal cycle deadline here in FL and I am getting calls from people who are confused that they can’t access sessions in their Pending Activities list as they’ve expired.

We’ve had Ethos for 3 years and some of these users have over one hundred activities in their pending list with the majority being expired. I am having the same issues as when I first posted this thread, but I found a solution that prevents me having to unenroll a learner that attended but did not complete the activity in order to clear it from their pending list.

Before editing the learner’s enrollment, I modify the RSS session itself to have variable credit. This way, when I mark the learner as completed, the credits are not automatically assigned. This still means I have to manually edit each lerner activity record (one by one) but at least I don’t have to go back into the credit report tab to remove credits. It has the added benefit of showing in their transcript sans credits.

I hope this fix is somewhere in the pipeline, or maybe a better way to edit a user’s credits from their transcript page, instead of under each individual activity. Either or would be a great Christmas present :wink:

Hello! This issue is a big problem for us as well - to clarify, this only happens with RSS sessions, all other activities come off of the pending list once they expire. We have a ticket in with Ethos - opened Aug 25 2022. The most recent response is from 10 Nov 2023: “Per our discussion, I have created a core ticket to bring to one our our next planning sessions about this issue. I will circle back once we have an agreed upon approach and more of an idea of when we can get this into a sprint.”

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