How do I allow my students to earn a new certificate for the same course again after their certificate expires?

There are cases where you would want your awarded certificates to expire, so that students are forced to get a new one from you if they need another valid certificate for the same course. For example, they may need this certificate to get continuing education units (CEUs) in order to maintain their license to work in a particular field.

Regardless of the intent, the two cases above share the same core problem: how do you allow your students to retake the same course from scratch (i.e., from start to finish again)? Once that is solved, the next problem is to award them the certificate after re-doing the course work. In LifterLMS, the solution is a three-part process:

Clone the course you want your students to be able to retake.
Retire the old course by first hiding that course from your course catalog page and then setting a course end date .
Create new engagements to award certificates based on the newly-cloned course.

The first two of the steps above can be accomplished in one go by using the LifterLMS Course Cohorts add-on. In particular, you just need to follow the instructions in how to create a cohort. For example, maybe your old course from the year 2024 is named “Course 1”. Then your brand-new “course cohort” could be named “Course 1 (2025)”.

Once this “cohort cohort” is made using the add-on, the next step is to create a brand new engagement that awards a certificate in response to completing that newly-created “Course 1 (2025)”. For instance, if you already have an engagement that awards a certificate when a student completes “Course 1,” you’ll need to create an additional engagement that issues a certificate upon finishing the cloned “Course 1 (2025).”

This works because a course cohort is really just a clone of a course, with some modifications added on course enrollment start/end dates, course start/end dates, and course visibility on the course catalog page. Cloning a course does not copy the students enrolled on that old course nor the progress that students made on that course which allows the students to “retake” the course.