Setting an expiration period for courses and learning programs helps you control how long learners can access your content. Expiration settings can be used to support time-limited access, encourage course completion within a specific timeframe, or manage the availability of your learning material.
When a product has an expiration period, enrolled users lose access once the defined time has passed. The expiration countdown starts individually for each learner on the date they enroll in the course or learning program.
In this article, you will learn how to configure the expiration date for courses and learning programs in LearnWorlds.
How expiration works
The expiration period for a course or learning program begins on the learner’s enrollment date. Once the configured period ends, the learner’s access expires, and the content can no longer be accessed unless access is manually extended or restored by the school admin.
If a course is configured to expire after one month, the countdown starts on the enrollment date and lasts for 30 or 31 days, depending on the calendar month. For consistency, February is treated as a 30-day month.Configure expiration date
1. Navigate to Courses & Programs.
2. Click on the product you want to update (course or learning program).
3. Navigate to Access.
4. In Program expiration, choose the expiration period by selecting the duration from the drop-down menu. You can set the course access to expire after a specific number of days, weeks, months, or years.
5. Click on Save.
- Expiration period is available only for courses and learning programs. Subscriptions work differently, as they provide access through recurring renewals and payments. Learners retain access for as long as their subscription remains active and successfully renewed, so subscriptions cannot support fixed expiration dates.
- If a course with its own expiration date is included in a Learning Program, the course expiration setting will not apply when users access it through the program. In this case, only the Learning Program expiration date is taken into account, provided that one has been configured.
- Changing or adding an expiration date to a course does not retroactively affect users who are already enrolled. Existing learners keep their current expiration settings, if any.
What happens after expiration
- Learners can no longer access the course or its learning materials.
- Their progress, scores, and completion data remain stored and will be restored if they are re-enrolled.
- Expired learners appear as Unenrolled due to expiration in reports and filters.
- Admins can extend access, reset the expiration period, or manually re-enroll learners when needed. Click here for the steps.
Regain access after expiration
To give access to an expired course while preserving user progress, such as exams and scores, you can use one of the options below:
- Re-enroll the learner to restore access to the course if a learner’s access has expired and they have been unenrolled. Υou can either apply a default expiration date to all included products or configure a different expiration period for each product individually. Further instructions are available here.
- Provide a 100% discount offer so they can re-enroll on their own. Here you can check how to create a URL with a coupon code already applied.
- Extend the expiration date from the user's profile. This change will apply only to that specific user. You can check the steps here.
For courses using payment plans, recurring Stripe payments continue even if the learner’s course access expires, unless the payment plan is manually canceled. Since billing and course access are managed separately, it is recommended to review these settings carefully to avoid confusion.