Retire the course if:

You've offered it in the past, but will no longer offer it in the future. Retiring a course retains it for your historic Academic records and preserves the integrity of transcripts, degree audits, etc.—but prevents you from adding it to future Academic Terms.

Delete the course if:

You've never offered it, and it should never have been in your Course Catalog in the first place. You can only delete a course if there is no historic information attached to it.

Edit the course details if:

You're offering the same course with the same abbreviation, but are simply updating it to reflect changes to existing courses in your Catalog. 

For example...

For years, you've offered Introduction to English (ENG101, 2 credits) and Introduction to Writing (WRI101, 2 credits) alongside one another. Every incoming Freshman had to take both courses as part of your General Education requirements. Then, in 2013, the Board met and decided to combine the two Courses to make room for some other General Education Courses, effective as of the 2014-2015 Academic Year, Fall Term. WRI101 was to be folded in to ENG101; ENG101 was to be bulked up to accommodate the additional work from the Writing Course.

All you need to do in this situation is, at the conclusion of the 2013-2014 Academic Year, Spring Term:

1. Retire WRI101.
2. Edit ENG101. You might change the description, give it 4 credits, update the enrollment limits, and so on.

Then, when you're adding Courses to the Fall 2014-2015 term:

• WRI101 has been retired, so it won't be there for you to offer. However, it will still appear on historic transcripts just as it did before.
• ENG101, when you add it to the Term (in Academics > Courses), will reflect the changes you made in the Course Catalog.
• However, for all the students who took ENG101 in previous years, their transcripts will reflect ENG101 as it existed at the time they took it—as a 2-credit course.

Moving forward into future Terms and Years, the updates you made to ENG101 will be automatically conveyed into all future instances of that course... that is, until you change it again.