Using Prerequisites and Requirements

garciah
Community Champion

Hi Canvas Community,

I'm creating a guide to using Prerequisites and Requirements in Canvas courses, and I'm looking for tips, best practices, gotchas, limitations, and innovative ways you've used Prerequisites and Requirements in your courses. If you have any advice I'd love to hear it!

To start the conversation, I'll describe one way I've used Requirements:

I have a training course that participants complete over a period of months. We received feedback that participants couldn't remember where they left off in the training each time they returned to it. We didn't want to restrict the order in which participants reviewed the materials, but we did want them to, by the end of the training, complete everything, and we wanted to give them a way to track their progress. So, we used Requirements. The great thing about Requirements is, once each one is completed, a green check mark indicates that the Requirement is complete. We required that all pages are viewed and all assignments are submitted, but we didn't use Prerequisites because it didn't matter the order in which the materials were consumed.

Requirements allowed participants to track their own progress without locking the course down.