If you are building out a recurring certification program, you can create a course enrollment expiration and use post-completion emails to automatically alert students when it’s time to re-take the course or renew their certification.
Contents
- Set up a Course Enrollment Expiration
- Set up an automatic post-completion email for re-certification reminders
Set up a Course Enrollment Expiration
Setting a Course Enrollment Expiration allows students to generate new certificates upon successful course completion, and helps you keep track of which students are re-enrolling over time. To learn more about managing re-enrollments, see Enabling Manual and Automatic Course Re-Enrollments.
By entering an expiration window following registration, students will have access to the course for that specified period of time. When coupled with the first self-service re-enrollment option, the student's enrollment will be reset at the end of the expiration window (their enrollment will have expired). At this point, the student must register for the course again in order to re-take it.
The Course Enrollment Expiration and Certificate Expiration dates are separate objects and can impact certification renewals depending on your course re-enrollment settings. To learn how to set up and manage re-enrollment settings, see Enabling Manual or Automatic Course Re-Enrollments.
The Certificate Expiration Date can be set in your Course Management setting within your Skilljar dashboard. To learn how to create a certification and set the certificate expiration date, see Create and Issue Certificates.
- Note: While the expiration date can appear on the certificate, it does not remove the certificate from the student's record. The program owner must edit the published course settings in order for the student to retake the course and earn a new certificate
Recommendation: Consider setting the Course Enrollment Expiration date a month or so in advance of the Certificate Expiration date so that the student can retake the course/exam and be issued an updated certificate. Example: Your certificate is valid for 12 months. Set your Course Expiration date and post-completion action date for 11 months so that your student is able to re-enroll and complete the course/exam again prior to their certificate lapsing.
By using the above settings, each course enrollment will generate a new line under the Enrollment Analytics item and each successful course completion will also generate a new certificate.
- Note: If a student retakes a quiz within the same Course Enrollment and Course Progress, the new quiz score will not be reflected on the Course Progress level and a new certificate will not be generated.
Set up an automatic post-completion email for re-certification reminders
You can set up a post-completion email, which will notify students who have previously taken your training that their certification is about to expire and when it’s time to renew it. You can manage the exact time when the reminder email is sent to students.
For example, if a certification expires 12 months after the issue date, you can create a post-completion email to be sent to students 11 months later, letting them know they have 30 days left to get re-certified.
To learn more about how to create and manage post-completion emails, see post-completion emails.
- Tip: You can auto-register students into your course by adding ?reg=1 at the end of the course web address/URL within the post-completion email. This will give students instant access so they can re-take the course.