Publishing and managing your catalog

Overview

Your catalog is the set of courses learners can browse. This guide covers the levers that decide what appears there and in what order: publishing status, visibility, featured placement, catalog badges, sort order, and archiving.

The course lifecycle

Every course has a status that moves through three stages:

1. Draft — the course is being authored and is invisible to learners. New courses start here.
2. Published — the course is live in the catalog. Publishing sets a published date the first time.
3. Archived — the course is retired from the live catalog but kept for records.

Publish a course

1. Open the Catalog or Records view and click a course title to select it.
2. Confirm the course is ready — it has a summary, outcomes, and at least the content you want learners to see.
3. Click Publish on the course row, or open the Builder and click Publish.
4. Confirm. The status changes to Published, visibility is set to public, and the course joins your live catalog immediately.

Tip: Publishing stamps a published date the first time only. If you unpublish (set back to draft) and republish later, the original published date is preserved — useful for keeping "newest" ordering honest.

Control visibility

Visibility decides who can see a published course:

• Public — anyone can find the course page and (with preview enabled) sample it.
• Internal — the course is restricted to your organization's members, ideal for private client training or internal enablement.

Set visibility in the course edit flow. Publishing a course sets it public by default; switch it to internal afterward if it shouldn't be world-visible.

Feature and badge courses

Two controls promote a course within the catalog:

• Featured — pins the course to the top of the catalog ordering. Homepage featured additionally promotes it on your homepage.
• Catalog badge — a small label on the card such as New, Popular, or Bestseller.

Courses in the catalog are ordered featured first, then by newest published date, then by creation date, then alphabetically. So featuring a course is the strongest way to push it to the front.

Order the catalog

Beyond featuring, the catalog sort order field gives each course an explicit position for finer control. Use it to curate a deliberate sequence — for example, putting a flagship course ahead of its follow-ups even if a newer course was published more recently.

A realistic workflow

You've just finished a new flagship course and want it front and center:

1. Select "Operator Certification" in Records.
2. Edit → set catalog badge to "New".
3. Edit → turn on Featured and Homepage featured.
4. Publish. Status → Published, visibility → public.
5. Check the Catalog view: the course now sits at the top with a "New" badge.

A month later you remove the New badge and turn off homepage featuring, letting it settle into the normal ordering while a newer course takes the spotlight.

Archive a course

When a course is outdated, archive it rather than deleting:

1. Select the course in Catalog or Records.
2. Use Delete on the row (this archives the course) or edit its status to archived.
3. Confirm. The course leaves the live catalog but its enrollments, progress, and certificates stay intact.

Tip: Archiving is reversible and record-safe. Prefer it to deletion so you never lose completion history a learner might need to prove later.

Tips

• Keep your published count clean — archive superseded courses so learners aren't confused by two versions of the same material.
• Use featured sparingly. If everything is featured, nothing is.
• Refresh catalog badges on a schedule; a New badge that's a year old undermines trust.
• Use internal visibility to soft-launch a course to your own team before making it public.

Troubleshooting

• A published course isn't in the catalog. Confirm both status (published) and visibility. An internal course won't show on the public catalog.
• The wrong course is at the top. Ordering is featured-first, then newest published. Turn off featuring on the course you don't want pinned, or adjust catalog sort order.
• I can't publish/archive. These actions require StretchLearn management permission. Ask your workspace administrator if the buttons are disabled.
• A course reappeared after archiving. Its status may have been re-published elsewhere. Re-check the status in the edit flow.

What to do next

• Group related courses with Packaging courses into learning paths.
• Watch enrollment and completion in Tracking completion and certificates.