Creating a prerequisite training course

[bpost]

We are in the process of transitioning to Canvas from Moodle and we're hoping someone has an elegant solution to an issue tied to required student training.

Our issue: At our institution, Students enrolled in their first online course are required to complete a short training course before they can access materials in their online course. In Moodle, we use enrollment information to create a unique user ID (orientation) for students who matched the criteria requiring the training that placed them into the training course. Upon completion of that course, students received a badge that changed their unique ID in their online course(s) to "student," at which point they could access the course(s) materials. This is a mostly automated process, but it was complicated to create and requires a unique data sync with our SIS (Banner).

My question: if we're trying to do something similar in Canvas (basically create a prerequisite "course") used as a gateway to enrolled course access, what would be the best practice to put that in place? Preferably there's an elegant Canvas-native solution that won't require us to manipulate our SIS integration like we've done with Moodle, but any suggestions for how to best address this issue is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

[BrianLester]

Hi,

To my knowledge there's no way to achieve 'out of the box'.

You'd need to set up your SIS to create different user roles corresponding to a custom use role (maybe a separate Canvas subaccount for the training course) and then run a script to check for completion of training course and update user role. 

A canvas native solution would could use the module locking feature so that the training course would be a module in one of a students  courses. Adding the module to one course could be accomplished with API calls in canvas only. One call to list student's enrollments another script (with multiple API calls to add the module to say the first course on the list). Now obviously this would only allow you to lock the student out of the course containing the training module...

[bpost]

Thanks Brian. That’s pretty much exactly what we’re currently doing in our Moodle instance, so at least we won’t be building it up entirely from scratch.