Courses in Bridge LMS can be set up to expire based on three criteria:

• Learner Completion date
• Learner Enrollment date
• Specific date

These can be found in the course settings.

Popular examples of expirations are:

• Completion date → 365 after completion
• Enrollment date → 365 days after initial enrollment
• Specific date → every year on January 1

Courses that expire can do three things after expiration:

• Auto re-enroll the learner and the previous completion becomes inactive
• Complete and remain in an active state with the ability to re-enroll as needed
• If incomplete, the enrollment will show as overdue on the learner’s page until completed

An auto re-enrollment will systematically enroll the learner in that same course to accommodate the rules of the expiration settings. The “Learners will be given X days to complete the course before it expires” means that the learner will be re-enrolled X days prior to the set date from one of the rules: completion, enrollment, or specific date.

SIDE NOTE: If the course is never completed by the learner, Bridge will not complete the enrollment with a “fail” or un-enroll the learner. The learner will simply stay in an overdue status.

It is possible to expire a course without auto re-enrollment by unchecking the box.

If a course is set to expire without auto re-enrollment, the enrollment will simply gray out in the “Learners” tab at the course level.

Stephanie Manager completed the course on July 14 and it is set to expire on December 31.

Because auto re-enrollment is not set for this course, she does not (and will not) have another in progress enrollment for the same course. This enrollment is, therefore, active. This means that the admin (or an enroller with permissions) could re-enroll Stephanie Manager for any reason.

A learner with another active and in progress enrollment, generally because auto re-enrollment is set, will have the historical enrollment as inactive.

James Manager already triggered re-enrollment; therefore, the historical enrollment is inactive, and there is no meatball menu to the right of the enrollment.

Expired courses are never deleted from the learner’s history, and active and inactive enrollments will all show in Analytics. In the present example, we search the enrollment date as “any time” and the learnable title as “Slack Best Practices.” We can see all active and inactive enrollments for this course. Stephanie Manager and James Manager’s completions are both on this Transcript.

Active enrollments are exposed to the admin on the admin dashboard when looking up a specific learner. Stephanie Manager has “Slack Best Practices” on her completed list.

This will also show up on the completed section of Stephanie Manager’s My Learning page.

Once the re-enrollment is triggered, it takes the historical completion to inactive. So an inactive enrollment will not be exposed to the admin on the user dashboard under the completed section because that user will have an open enrollment to the course. 

SIDE NOTE: There is one situation where a historical enrollment can be inactive and the learner does not also have an active enrollment in the course. That is if a historical upload is completed and the enrollments are marked as inactive upon upload without accompanying active enrollments.

James Manager can also not see “Slack Best Practices” under his completed section because he’s been re-enrolled, putting the course into the required section.

The key here is to recognize that a course should not, by design, appear in two sections simultaneously.

From a technical standpoint, all courses have a unique ID (this is a number value that can be seen in the URL when inside the course or it can be viewed in the course_templates.csv through the data dump). All users also have a unique ID (this is also a number value that can be seen in the URL when in the user management dashboard for a specific learner or in the users.csv from the data dump). It is not possible for the same user ID to have more than one active enrollment to the same course ID. There can be a limitless number of inactive enrollments because of historical completions, which can all be viewed in the Transcript, but active enrollments have a 1:1 relationship.

For more details on re-enrollment settings, you can read more here.