[ARCHIVED] How to have courses appear as "Completed" in the student dashboard

[fosterl]

We're new to Catalog (I'll have to stop saying that one of these days), and have just had our first "session" of courses end. However, the courses appear in the student dashboard as "Not Completed". The subcatalog admin has talked to a couple of different Canvas Support agents, and here's what was suggested:

To fix this in future courses, each course must have a Module Requirement* which is completed by the student in order for the course to appear in the Catalog Dashboard as "Completed" after the course ends. It is not sufficient to have the course Ends date arrive, nor was concluding the students suggested.

Does this sound right? I know there is a lot of confusion surrounding how to get courses to show up correctly in transcripts. Does anyone have best practices they can recommend?

Canvas Support is also suggesting that to retroactively fix the courses already complete, the following (too lazy to paraphrase all this):

"To retroactively fix prior courses, we recommended setting up a faux assignment. Then add this assignment to a module of wiht the requirment to "Score at least." Then you'll need to provide the appropriate score on the assignment. This way, you can quickly provide a score to those students so that the item is marked complete. This also will not require you to masquerade as the student to achieve those completions."

Any better suggestions on how to fix the already completed courses?

*In fact, right now it has to be two module requirements, due to an issue Engineering is looking into.

[kevinhitt]

Hello  @fosterl ‌, 

I am fairly new to Catalog myself, but that sounds like normal behavior for the Courses to only show as 'Completed' in the Catalog Dashboard if an "Assignment" has been added to the course in Canvas.

Otherwise, if the end date passes or the course is concluded, there is nothing telling the Canvas course that the student has 'Completed' anything unless an "Assignment" is added & graded.

Also, unfortunately, I cannot think of a way to update the existing courses you have without individually adding an Assignment to each past course. This could be expedited by using POST requests to the API, but would still require attention to individual courses. 

Wishing you the best of luck!

Kevin Hitt

[JustinBrooksby]

Yes this seems like a major issue. We just started using Catalog but have been a Canvas client since the founding of Instructure.  We have 10 years worth of courses on student accounts now showing up as Not Completed.  I would love for a fix or work around for this.  Maybe if I could disable certain terms from showing up, or mark a start date for courses to show up in Catalog???

[jsowalsk]

A start date may help to resolve this. Maybe submit a feature request for this and tag it #catalogenhancements‌ and repost it to this group to get votes to make others aware of this issue.

[fosterl]

After several hours of going around and around with Canvas Support, I think we have a way forward. We have been instructed that, yes, Catalog needs a way to know that the course is "Completed". Apparently the ONLY way Catalog thinks a course is completed, is by having a Module with requirements which are met. The minimum set of requirements are for the Module to have at least one required item, but those items must be completed sequentially. So, for example:

This seems to be working.

Unfortunately, to fix this retroactively (in courses already completed), I had to Act as User for each student and click through the required items. Just setting a grade for the required items does NOT set completion!

My understanding (from our super helpful CSM) is that the requirement that the items being completed sequentially is currently under review by Engineering, as it doesn't really make sense. But today, this is how we have to do it.

I'd be super interested to hear if things work differently for others.

[jsowalsk]

Yes, this is correct. Here is an article explaining this: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-9649-26051275621 

[Sara-Newman]

the link provided is a dead link 😞 

[bernstlc]

You may try making the module requirement scoring 1/1 (or something) on a no-submission assignment. We do this in some of our courses where completion is determined by the student's final grade in the gradebook. The instructor goes through the gradebook and gives just the passing students a "1". For past courses, you may need to make sure the section/course end date is after the date you do the grading (otherwise the student didn't "complete" the course in time).

[jsowalsk]

Try this: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Catalog/How-do-I-use-the-Catalog-dashboard/ta-p/1742