Deleting an Open edX course

We're sorry! This title is intentionally misleading. Unfortunately, there is no way to fully delete an Open edX course. However, this article will hopefully inform you why that is the case and fill you in on the things you can do instead.

Why can't I delete an Open edX course?

Deleting an Open edX course is something that can only be done on the backend by an Appsembler engineer. It's not something we do very often because deleting a course also means deleting certain student data that is tied to that course. 

In a nutshell, it has the high potential to create a big mess. Thankfully, there are several things you can do in order to make sure students never see the course. 

How to hide a course and restrict access

In order to make sure your courses aren't seen by any learners there are a few things you can do. 

1. Hide the course from your course catalog
2. Make the course by-invitation only

These two steps will make it impossible for anyone to find and enroll themselves in your course on your LMS. 

I still see my course in Studio!

Although the course is hidden on your Learning Management System, the course will still appear in your Studio dashboard. Unfortunately, there is no way to change this. 

We recommend changing the display name of the course in Advanced Settings so that the course appears alphabetically last. By simply adding a few "Z"s to the beginning of your course's display name, the course will appear at the bottom of the course list in Studio. 

Example: rename "Test Course" to "ZZZ (Removed) Test Course"