Complete tasks in any order, AND ensure progress

[emily]

Hi, folks-

Time for another puzzler.  I have a number of courses that follow this pattern:

• Each student must complete five exercises by the end of the year (or by graduation).
• Exercises can be done in any order.
• Each semester, they must do at least one exercise.
• A letter grade is given at the end of the year; a pass/fail is noted in other semesters.

So faculty need to track two things: 1) did the student do any assignment this semester? and 2) did they do one of each assignment by the end of the year?

The first item seems very simple; you just make the course last 12 calendar months and list the assignments. All five must be complete before the end of the year. But how do you know if at least one of those was completed THIS semester? Is there, perhaps, a way to export grades or submissions in a way that includes the datestamp when it was submitted? Maybe using Modules and "students must do one of the following"? Or perhaps there's an entirely different and better way of doing this?

Many thanks,

Emily

[tbunag]

If you will be calculating the grade outside of Canvas, you could make two copies of each assignment, and make the availability correspond to the semester.  It's an inelegant approach that I find wanting.  If you wanted to prevent students from accidentally completing the same assignment twice, you could pull the records after the first semester, then only assign students to the second copy of the assignment if they didn't complete it the first time around.  This is still messier than I'd like.

Perhaps there's an alternative with Mastery Paths that might work?

[garciah]

You might want to looking into grading periods. I've never used them, but it sounds like they might be useful in this case. Good luck!

[Robbie_Grant]

 @emily ,

We are giving the Instructional Designers area a little bit of love and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[emily]

Hi, Robbie-

No, we don't have a good solution for this yet. Currently, it looks like this:

• One course per semester
• Modules with all five options available; must complete 1 (really wish there was a way, looking at the gradebook, to see who had completed their "one thing.")
• Experimenting with Badgr and some homegrown code to award a badge for "one of each of the five." The code might be irrelevant in a few weeks when the new version comes out, which can track across courses. So, if you earn your "First Thing" badge in fall, it will still show up on your list in Winter.

Emily