Draft, Published, Archived: Keeping Track of Where Your Courses Are Up To

The first few courses you build do not need a system. You know what each one is because you made them all this week. Somewhere around the tenth, opening the dashboard stops being a list of things you recognise and starts being a list of things you have to think about.

What do the statuses actually mean?

A course is a draft until you say otherwise, published once it is out in the world, and archived when it is finished with. Archiving is deliberately separate from the draft-to-published lifecycle: a course can be archived whether or not it was ever published, and archiving does not delete anything.

When does a course become published?

Published means it has left the building. In practice that is one of three moments:

• You exported it to SCORM or HTML and uploaded it to an LMS. The export is the moment it stopped being yours alone.
• It was approved for the course directory, where anyone can open it.
• You marked it published yourself, because you shared it in a way we cannot see.

The first two happen automatically. The third is a manual toggle, and it exists because plenty of courses go live in ways a tool has no visibility of — an intranet page, an email attachment, a USB stick handed to a site supervisor.

Why not just use "finished"?

Because "finished" is a judgement about the content and "published" is a fact about the world. A course can be finished and unpublished for months while you wait on legal sign-off. A course can be published and thoroughly unfinished, which every training team has done at least once.

Keeping the two apart means the status tells you something you cannot work out by opening the course.

What does archiving actually do?

It takes the course out of your main list without deleting it. The content, modules and images stay exactly as they were, and you can bring it back at any time. Archived courses also stop counting towards your plan's course limit, which is the practical reason most people use it.

Use it for superseded versions, courses for a client you no longer work with, and the experiments you would rather not scroll past every day. Do not use it as a filing system for work in progress — that is what draft is for.

How should I organise a growing course list?

Three habits cover most of it:

• Archive aggressively. If you have not opened it in six months and it is not live anywhere, archive it. It is one click to bring back.
• Mark things published when they go live, even if you published them somewhere we cannot detect. Future you will want to know which version people actually received.
• Search rather than scroll. The dashboard search covers titles, so a consistent naming habit — client, topic, year — pays for itself quickly.

Does status affect anything else?

Not functionally. Status does not lock a course, restrict editing, or change what exports. It is a record, not a permission system. You can edit a published course freely — though if it is sitting in an LMS, remember that editing here does not update the copy you already uploaded there. That copy is a file someone downloaded; changing the original does not reach it.

What happens when I copy or clone a course?

The copy starts as a draft, regardless of the state of the original. That is deliberate: a clone of a published course has not been published anywhere, and inheriting the status would make the list lie about what is live.

It is worth renaming a clone immediately. Two courses with the same title and different statuses is the single most common way people edit the wrong one, and the moment of copying is the only moment you reliably remember which is which.

The one that catches people out

Exporting to SCORM marks a course published, and that surprises people who exported to test the file. It is the right default — most exports are real — but if you are just checking something, set it back to draft afterwards. It takes a second and keeps the list honest.