We know that part of the reason why you’re using Coassemble, is we make updating and maintaining your training easy. Whether you’re updating your product training for customers, or refreshing your team onboarding, our tool makes this process simple. We’ve outlined some tips and steps below for managing your content.
Tips for managing updates
Organize your folders from Day 1.
Are you going to have a “Retired Courses” folder? Or a folder for the training you have delivered each year? Think about how to best set up your folders to organize your courses. If you'd like to learn more about using folders, review our article: How do I use folders?
Decide on a naming convention for your version control.
If you revise your team onboarding course each year, you may want to name it “New Staff Onboarding 2023” and update the year for each version of the course. Alternatively, you could opt to have v.1.1 at the end of each course as it’s retired.
Use your course card images as a visual indicator.
To prevent confusion, you can swap out the course card image to demonstrate that a course is an older version, or has been retired.
How do I make a new, updated version of my course?
To update your course and maintain the old version, you’ll want to Duplicate the course.
The benefit of duplicating the course is the old version will exist with any data remaining intact (this is particularly important if you have learners that are still in the process of completing the material).
If you're unfamiliar with duplicating courses, you can learn about this process in our article, How do I duplicate a course?
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens to learners who may be in the middle of the original course?
You will need to decide if you want the learners that are currently enrolled to complete the current version, or if they should be enrolled in the new version. Their progress isn't carried over, so they'd need to start the new version of the course from scratch, or you can mark modules as "complete" for certain learners via their learner profile. This could be an arduous task if there are a lot of learners who have partially completed the course.
What can I do to avoid users from not being able to complete the original training?
You can keep the existing learners in the current training for them to be able to review/complete it. It's up to you if they get enrolled in the new version as well. We recommend having a strong naming convention so that the learner can tell the difference if they're enrolled in both. We also recommend ensuring your internal team clearly knows which is the new version of the course to be used going forward.
Should I just update the URL so that new users take the new training and then wait to archive the original one until I see that there are no new users or that they've completed?
We normally see customers use the new version for anyone new and not enrolling in the original version anymore. The current learners in the original version will complete the training there and anyone new will see the new version. If it's important that anyone that had previously completed or has course progress in the original version see the updated content, we recommend enrolling everyone in the new version so that they have access to the updated materials.
This would be a decision on your side on whether or not it's important for the existing learners to see the new content.
What happens if I archive the original training as soon as I publish the new one?
Archiving a course will make the course no longer visible to the learners enrolled into it. It will also remove the reporting for that course, so you won't have historic access to reporting. You can export the reports prior to archiving the course so you have an offline copy as they won't be accessible in the platform anymore. You may also choose to move the course into a different folder called 'Past courses' or similar instead of archiving it.
The original training generates and emails users a customized certificate of completion at the end. I do not see that certificate on the LMS. If I duplicate the course, will the same certificate of completion be sent out at the end of that one, too?
The certificate doesn't copy across when you duplicate the course. You can make the certificate a template so that you can use it in the new version.
Jump into the original course, click edit on the certificate and then "Save as template". The certificate will then be available as a template in the new version so you don't have to create it again from scratch.