Organizations need a non-billable expired-user state that preserves credentials while preventing ongoing licensing costs and allowing easy re-enrollment/repurchasing.

Organizations that sell annual access often need a way to allow former learners to retain access to earned certificates and badges without continuing to incur active-user licensing costs.

Currently, the primary option to archive a users, requires either manual archiving  steps or API automation. There are not options to automate the archival of a user. Simply deactivating  a user from their courses is not sufficient because they can still log in which counts toward s a license even if they are only accessing historical certificates or browsing the catalog.  Why should someone just browsing or looking up their history occur the same cost as someone actively learning? 

Business Impact

This creates a difficult choice:

• Leave users active and continue paying licensing costs for former learners who rarely use the system.
• Archive users and prevent self-service access to certificates and badges.
• Require former learners to contact support whenever they want proof of completion or wish to purchase additional training.

For organizations with large numbers of annual learners, this can result in ongoing costs for users who are no longer actively participating in training.

Suggested Solution

Introduce an Expired User status that:

• Prevents the user from counting as a billable active user.
• Preserves certificates, badges, and completion history.
• Allows limited self-service access to transcript and certificate records.
• Prevents access to courses and other licensed learning content.
• Allows self-service reactivation through course purchase, subscription renewal, or access code redemption.
• Can be applied automatically after a configurable period (for example, 365 days after enrollment or subscription expiration).

Benefits

• Reduces licensing costs for training providers.
• Preserves learner access to earned credentials.
• Eliminates unnecessary support requests.
• Improves the learner experience by allowing easy re-enrollment.
• Supports annual subscription and continuing education business models more effectively.

Example Use Case

A learner completes a certificate program and remains inactive for one year. The account automatically transitions to Expired status. The learner can still retrieve certificates and badges but does not consume an active-user license. Six months later, the learner purchases another course and the account automatically returns to Active status without requiring administrator intervention.