How to set up a course where students can choose some assignments

[venitk]

I'm working on setting up a course with 3 required assignments and a suite of optional ones (assignments and discussions) that they can choose from. 

How do I set this up? I thought at first it would be as easy as not having the ungraded items =0, but there are required assignments that should be 0s if not completed. Also, as the course is originally designed, they should be working towards a total percentage of points earned. In other words, the required assignments are 50% of their grade, and they should choose enough optional assignments to equal another 50% of their grade (whether or not they earn a perfect score on those assignments). 

Then I thought I'd set up the optional assignments in an assignment group and drop the lowest grades, but there aren't a certain number of assignments they have to do... There's a grade they can work towards, but each of the optional assignments are worth a different amount of points. So, they could do one 40 point research paper or participate in eight 5-point discussions and get the same grade.

Any ideas? If it helps, we're on the New Gradebook. 

[laurakgibbs]

Hi  @venitk ‌, and thanks to Robert Carroll for pinging me about this; I have struggled with this in Canvas, and maybe someone has an answer.

I do not have an answer.

My course is based on a points system where students choose what to do. For example, here is this week:

Online Course Wiki / Week 4 

It means I end up with an enormous Gradebook, and students have lots of "blanks" in the Gradebook. They see their total points, and that is all they see. I cannot use a Canvas Grading Scheme based on percentage out-of, so students just look at the total points and track their progress that way. (In my system, their percentage score is always 100%; what varies is the points.)

At the end of the semester, I manually enter the letter grade in our SIS since I cannot have a final grade display in Canvas.

I run into enormous trouble because Canvas insists on labeling the blanks as "missing," so I use James's script to remove those missing labels (which are VERY confusing to the students of course; something that is a choice is obviously not missing, but Canvas is built on the assumption that students do not choose).

Here are materials relevant to my approach:

James's script for removing the missing labels:

Removing Missing and Late Labels 

the Progress Chart I share with my students since they cannot see an actual grade in Canvas:

Online Course Wiki / Progress Chart 

the Declarations approach I use where students record their work in the Gradebook:

OU Digital Teaching: Microassignments and Completion-Based Grading 

Maybe someone has a better solution. The old Gradebook worked better for me; the Missing labels in the new Gradebook are a disaster. If I didn't have James's script to save me, I don't know what I would do. More about the labels in Canvas:

Botched Gradebook Labels: Why haven't they fixed this yet? 

Thanks again for the ping, Robert; I stopped participating regularly here at the Community because of the need to self-censor re: Instructure's AI experiments (still waiting on information about the AI opt-out...), but I'm glad to comment if there is a topic for which I have relevant materials.

I hope you find a good solution, Katie!