[MasteryPaths] Mastery Paths: Automatically Set Conditional Item Due Dates

[tcparodi]

Right now, as it stands, you can create a pre-test and then trigger 3 paths using Mastery Paths. But, if I give a due date for each item in the Mastery Path (before student interaction), this due date does not 'stick' to the assignment as the students begin to take the pre-test. Does not sound too earth shattering, right? Wrong.

I have elementary students and I have come to learn that if it is good for elementary, it is good for the rest of the world. Our gradebooks are organized by due date (numerically). In addition, if an assignment does not have a due date, it won't show up in the gradebook. So my kids/parents were really thrown off when I started using Mastery Paths. They could progress monitor completion of the items in the path (using requirements set in the modules), but when it came to viewing the student's achievement on those assignments, they were lost. This is because I need to go in and manually assign due dates to each student's assignments in the path after they complete their pre-test. Granted, there are only three paths, but if I have 18 kids, I'm going in after the last of the 18 finishes that pre-test (and I'm virtual, so that could be 3 or 4 weeks after the first kid finished their pre-test). It is sort of a logistical nightmare.

The intention is for this to personalize and individualize their education. Right now, for that potential to be reached (as Canvas intended), the due date predetermined by the teacher as they built the path, needs to follow as each child completes their pre-test. This will make each item in the path show up in the gradebook so parents and students can see if the concept was understood and to what degree.

How I set it up

How it breaks

[thompsli]

This could also create issues for courses like mine that have a fixed end date. If I trigger all of the semester-long course due dates based on the initial question "are you taking this course for Honors Credit or Regular Credit" and a student takes that "quiz" on the Friday of Orientation Week rather than the Monday of Orientation Week, I don't really want them to get several extra days to work (compared to the student who did their survey on Monday) for the entire term as their reward for procrastinating. That hurts the diligent students and encourages everyone to wait until the last second on their first task rather than get started with the course.

[wmathis]

It would totally work. You would just need to start with one project assignment and then place a mastery path to the next project assignment. 

[Steven_S]

Since each student has the same number of days for each assignment, there is no advantage to procrastinating the first assignment (or any assignment). Some students will finish earlier than others, but no students will have any more or less total time for each assignment than other students. 

For the first assignment, the challenge would be recognizing that if a student has not started an assignment by (date) and turns in all assignments in the mastery paths sequence at exactly the due time, the final assignment in the mastery paths sequence will be due (date - or list of dates for multiple paths).  If it was possible to include a note about that when setting the due date for the first assignment that would help make sure there will be enough time in the course for students to complete all assignments. 

Students who finish early would be rewarded with free time, or you could add extra enrichment with no due dates for them to explore until the first assignment for the next unit becomes available (or the end of the semester depending on your course design).

[thompsli]

Unfortunately, we are not allowed to have students finish our courses early (NCAA rules for alternative/online high school programs are very picky about this). We also can't let students finish late for the same reason, so we'd have to prevent someone who didn't take the "honors credit or regular credit?" quiz until the following week from being scheduled to take the final exam during the first week of the summer rather than the last week of school. 

It would also make it much harder to communicate deadlines with the class in general, or with various support staff, if instead of "big assignment #3 due Friday" I had to say "big assignment #3 is due sometime Monday-Friday this week depending on when a student completed a survey back in Week 00".

I could see this being really useful for other course designs, and especially for those using Mastery Paths to more meaningfully customize their courses based on individual results rather than trying to use them to have students self-select from two fixed tracks. It's just that with the constraints we're under, the only thing we'd use them for is the regular/honors tracks that we now have to sort students into manually (so students will answer a survey and hten be edited into sections, or some other similar option that requires individual editing rather than automation), and so I wanted to bring up how this wouldn't work well for our particular use case.

[Steven_S]

We have the same issue, and so I cannot use mastery paths at all right now.  Our rules actually require students to have some mandatory participation at least every week.

I can see how a single introductory question would make it more desirable to simply keep the built in due date, despite the mastery paths.  In fact, I don't think I would try to use mastery paths (as they are now) in your situation.  It would be a nightmare to have to add due dates continually to every assignment in the course for individual students.  I wonder if your enrollment can define different sections for honors and regular credit, so that you can do all your assigning by section, and skip the mastery path question. 

I think the only way mastery paths could be used with static pre-set due dates would be with the addition of a date that the initial "honors or regular" question MUST be answered.  Maybe requiring the use of the available until date would do it.

Removing due dates the way mastery paths do now, makes it almost impossible to communicate due dates.  I understand that this is because a student could otherwise start a path when it is already too late to meet any due dates and run into dead ends.  However, with a change that allowed a specified number of days to complete assignments assigned by mastery paths, there would be a due date built in.  Every other reference can either comment on the total days allowed for completion, or specify that the assignment is due on the date displayed in canvas.  (I do that already to minimize content updates when I import a course.)  I would also still have to pace students using module release dates to keep any from getting ahead of the rules that require weekly participation.  I do that already as well.

However without mastery paths assignment instructions become excessively long when all options have to be described at once, especially since early choices effectively decide which set of instructions a student will need for the rest of the course. It would be great to have the use of mastery paths to simplify what students see, but it needs to come with some form of due date. 

[thompsli]

Yeah, right now I do it by section. This creates its own "fun" when I roll over the course each year since section-specific due dates aren't preserved on course copy and I have to re-edit all of my assignments to add them back in. Because of our SIS integration, I can't put students in different sections by myself and so our registrar has to be involved in all of those section movements, but it's still better than mastery paths for us right now.

I really wish Canvas allowed for a lot more in the way of scripting multiple paths through courses - I run up against so many situations where I can describe what the choices should be using a series of logical statements that I'm confident I could program in correctly given an interface to do so, but there are so few tools in Canvas for different course and assignment structures that I end up doing a pretty rigid course with fewer student choices. (I particularly miss doing end-of-semester project menus rather than finals or single projects where students need to do something like turn in 500 points worth of assignments from a menu of 2500 points worth of possible tasks, ranging from a big 500 point task to a bunch of little 50-pointers that could add up. Every way I can think to do that in Canvas is more trouble than it's worth.)

[Steven_S]

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/15998-assign-assignment-groups-by-section  might help with reassigning due dates to honors vs regular students more efficiently. What might address your problem more directly, would be an idea to update course import to recognize due dates that were assigned by section, and prompt you to match previous sections to current sections. 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/16532-module-requirements-a-third-option?sr=inbox could help make project menu options available without mastery paths, and so your due dates could be retained.  However, I don't know of a way to set a maximum total possible points for a group of activities.  To address your situation completely, however, assignment groups might also need a setting to count only the (first, latest, highest) scores from activities that cumulatively have a maximum possible score of ___ points, so that students could not earn 2500 points when only 500 were allowed.

[thompsli]

Yeah, I've suggested https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/13225 before. I have one course where I have paper charts of which things get assigned to my accelerated section each week for the entire year and I get to go in and re-edit all of them into the class each year since they're not preserved on import.

The project menu thing would probably involve a level of customization within a single assignment where you could set up an assignment with things like multiple dropboxes and various criteria. I'm not surprised that Canvas doesn't have it, but I'll keep hoping anyway. It was a really good way to wrap up the term in a lot of classes when I taught in person.

[studyvs]

I am hoping with so many comments and so many upvotes that this issue gets fixed sometime soon. I know that Canvas support does not see it as an issue because it is documented. I ended up using Mastery Paths in my course this last semester and it was a big mistake. Mastery paths are just half-baked and did not work. Despite the insistence that it was working as designed.

One of my biggest complaints about the conditional item date issue, which I did not see mentioned anywhere here (if it was I must have missed it), is that the conditional items do not show up in the Upcoming Assignments for the students in my class (in the Assignments section), but would show up in the Undated Assignments. So students would complain to me that the assignment wasn't available. while they could easily find it if they looked, but this certainly doesn't make it simple for them.

[sosborne1]

I agree with this comment and was about to say the same thing - Due dates are needed for grading periods and if they don't have a due date that would be an issue - I hope Canvas fixes this bc we really want to use Mastery Pathways!