Records Management and Information Governance: Keep What Matters, Defend What You Keep

A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing

The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Records Management and Information Governance: Keep What Matters, Defend What You Keep course, in the Risk, Safety & Compliance category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.

Evidence is the test. Every organization runs on evidence it mostly did not plan to create — a decision made in a meeting, approved in a message, priced in a spreadsheet, inspected in the field, and argued about two years later by people who were not in the room. Records management is how an organization makes sure that, two years later, the evidence is still there, still readable, still complete — and that the material which should have been gone is demonstrably gone, on schedule and on authority, rather than lingering as cost and exposure.

It starts with what counts as a record. Every later decision — keep, classify, schedule, withhold, hold, destroy, transfer — is downstream of one decision: is this a record at all? You will learn the three-question test — was it recorded; was it made or received in the transaction of business; does it evidence what the organization did, or hold information it needs in order to answer for it — and why format is never the test: a record may be a database entry, a photograph, a recording, a message, or a bound volume, and the question is always what it proves, never what it is made of.

It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — The Discipline: What a Record Is and How Long It Lives — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Foundation Packet; then, Module 2 — The Governance: Access, Holds, Disposition, and Proof — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Response and Disposition File.

Both capstones produce real artifacts — a foundation packet for the fictional Iverleigh Public Services Authority's Customer Accounts unit: the inventory of its real holdings, its functional classification and capture minimums, the appraisal of each series, draft schedule rows a working unit can follow, and custody rules for storage, access, and channels; and a response and disposition file built under pressure: a legal hold that reaches custodians and systems, a public-records response with a withholding log, and a documented disposition of a forty-box backlog — assembled so a reviewer who trusts nothing can re-perform every decision in it.

The honesty standard is part of the course. Nothing in this course is legal advice, and nothing in it promises the outcome of any request, dispute, audit, or case. The public-records framework is taught at the federal level — the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act — and flagged wherever state law, which governs state and local public bodies, differs. Every retention period, deadline, and figure in the exercises is a stipulated teaching figure for the fictional Iverleigh authority, not a schedule you may adopt for your own organization; your own approved schedule and your counsel's advice govern your real work.

The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.

Records Management and Information Governance: Keep What Matters, Defend What You Keep is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning delivers.