Suggestions to help students track their assignments easier?

[Nick33]

For context, I supervise a program for a school and am not a teacher/professor but a staff member. The program has a set of requirements students are need to complete to remain in the program.

To meet these requirements, students have to attend a certain number of events that the program advertises. We advertise the events through the Assignments function/page and if a student attends said event, they can complete the assignment - for students who do not, they can leave it alone. Students are not required to complete all of the assignments.

Once submitted, we (staff) mark the assignment as "completed" but we do not give a grade nor does it affect a student's overall school grades. The assignments are more for record keeping than anything.

The problem is, because there are so many "assignments" posted, students are having a difficult time keeping track of what they've completed. On the staff/admin side, we can see what they completed fairly easily. On their side, all they see are missing/late assignments and then a few assignments that have been marked completed. 

I wanted to see if anyone has any suggestions to make tracking assignments easier for students through Canvas. There have been some talks of workarounds. For example, not advertising all the events onto Canvas and then using alternative ways to advertise the events. But we use Canvas for everything and it would much easier if we can keep it all in one place.

I'm not sure if this made any sense, but I'm happy to expand more on details if needed.

Thanks!

[SusanNiemeyer]

I might suggest that you go ahead and give a grade for completion of the activity. You could, for example, give 1 point per completion. Then the instructor would place these "Assignments" into a "Weighted Assignment Group" called something like "Activities." You could make that Assignment Group worth 0% of the final grade. Then you could remind students that they need a total of 10 points (or whatever number of activities they need to attend) in order to pass the course.

The instructors can also manually remove the labels "Late" / "Missing" from the Gradebook as well.  

[Hildi_Pardo]

First, I'm not sure if I'm understanding correctly -- so apologies if this isn't a valid suggestion, but here goes:

Would it be possible to create a separate Canvas course that is only for Events Assignments?  This would help the academic course be more organized and less cluttered.