multiple individual courses in one Canvas course

[MMatheas]

Hello Canvas Community,

I was hoping I could pick your brains please?

We have a course which is actually many individual courses in one. So, in fact each Canvas module is a stand alone course. To help identify pages in the Pages section (i.e. which page belongs to which module/course), we have coded each page title with a letter or pair of letters, just before the title. However, students see this code, and it is read out by screenreaders, both of which are not ideal. I was wondering if anyone could suggest a workaround so that we are still able to quickly identify which pages belong to which module in the pages sections, but students don't see this code and wonder what it's all about.

Best wishes,

Maro

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there, @MMatheas ...

Thanks for the detail and the question.  Could you please provide a bit more detail to your question, though?  Specifically, I am wondering why you are having many "courses" (each with its own Module) in one Canvas course shell.  I'm sure there are reasons for this that I am not aware of which may be of benefit to you and your students, so it would be interesting to know what the goal is to only use just one Canvas course shell.  In my opinion, the real solution to this is to use multiple course shells, and enroll your students in each of them.  That way, your content is separated out by course shell, and there is no need for your one- or two-letter code you are currently using.

I look forward to hearing back from you so that we can figure out a good way for you to accomplish what you want.  Take care...

[MMatheas]

Thank you @Chris_Hofer for your reply. The reason we do it this way is because these aren't actually academic courses but rather what we refer to as a 'community' for careers and employability. All the modules sit in the one community so that students only need to enrol in one Canvas course in order to have access to all the modules/courses on careers. It doesn't clutter their dashboard and also makes it more likely that they will engage with the learning experiences. I think you are probably right - I'm not sure I see a way around this. However, if you do happen to think of a nice solution, please do share your ideas! Thanks again for getting back to me 🙂 

[vancej]

I realize this is supper after the fact, but I have a colleague who is looing at this situation as something similar they are facing. I am curious are the linked courses contain so much content that it could not be housed in one shell?

[tbirbeck · Accepted solution]

Do the students use this as a reference or do you need submissions?   If no submissions or interactions are required, this solution I use for our Ed Tech modules might work for you.

• Create the main course as a navigation center. Students will enroll in this course.
• Create a separate course for each module.  Set the visibility for each at "institution" or "public".   Public and Institution courses do not show up on the dashboard and require no enrollment,  Be sure to add a link back to the main course in each subcourse.
• Create a course home page in the main course and add a link to each of the separate courses.
• The result will be one enrolled course on the dashboard with links to separate courses.  

If you want to get fancy, you could add custom course navigation links to the subcourses, but at a minimum, be sure to add a link back to the main course in each subcourse.

[MMatheas]

I quite like the sound of this solution! Thank you @tbirbeck. I have a couple further questions if you have the time:

1. When you set the visibility at institution, does this mean only those belonging to the institution will have access to it, and if it's set as 'public', then anyone with a link to the course, even outside the institution, will be able to access the resources?
2. When you say "If no submissions or interactions are required...", there will be interactions in the form of quizzes, but nothing more than that. No submissions/assignments. Is there any reason why quizzes might be a problem in this set up?

Thank you so much for this idea. 

Best wishes,

Maria 

[tbirbeck]

@MMatheas 

1. YES. When you set the visibility at the institution, does this mean only those belonging to the institution will have access to it, and if it's set as 'public', then anyone with a link to the course, even outside the institution, will be able to access the resources? 
2. YES. When you say "If no submissions or interactions are required...", there will be interactions in the form of quizzes, but nothing more than that. No submissions/assignments. Is there any reason why quizzes might be a problem in this set up? Interaction with quizzes would only be available for registered students. I don't know how messy it would get, but quizzes could be housed in the master course and linked from the sub-courses.  Depending on the structure of the courses this could be really simple or really messy.  I imagine it could look something like this:

• Module in subcourse
  • Materials
  • Quiz link to master course
• Module in the master course (Modules page hidden)
  • Quiz
  • Link back to sub course

The experience would be pretty much seamless to the user and would solve the registration issue.

 🙂  Traci

[ColtonSwapp]

Hello @MMatheas 

in my experience, it is best to have the course sections separated into separate courses. This will make it so that, as an example; students that are part of section A will be enrolled in course A and will not see any of the modules for Section B. 

Section B would be in it's own course and they will not see modules and content for Section A. Hopefully that makes sense. 

You can setup the course the way you have described, but students in the course will see all of the course modules instead of just certain ones that pertain to them. There currently isn't a way to assign modules to specific sections like you can do with assignments, quizzes, and discussions. This might make a good feature request to allow you to assign different modules to certain sections of the course. 

Hopefully this helps! 

-Colton

[MMatheas]

Thank you @ColtonSwapp for taking the time to reply. Would your solution require students to enrol in each course as and when they need access to it? I was wondering if you have seen @tbirbeck 's suggestion above - what did you think of that? This seems like it might be a good solution for us as students would only need to enrol once, and their dashboard would not get cluttered with too many courses. It does not matter if they can access courses (currently modules) that they don't need - I think they can just ignore the ones they don't need, and click on the links to the courses they'd like to access. Thank for the link to making feature requests!

Best wishes,

Maria