Module requirements, pages, and external tools

[clare_davies]

I've been experimenting for the first time with Prerequisites and Requirements in Canvas. However, one aspect is disappointing, and I can't find a workaround for it.

I have always run this course by having a Page for each week, full of instructive content, embedded external media (mainly Stream videos and Padlets), and links to external websites. The students like the way that they see explanations of what's what and why they're accessing it, rather than just a bald list under 'Modules'. It feels like a proper 'learning environment' that way. In fact, my institution has finally, now that we're doing 'blended learning' for covid reasons, endorsed this approach and told all staff to design courses this way.

The trouble is, the Requirements and Prerequisites tool instead assumes a sparse Module-list-based design for a course. On experimenting, I found that if I included an external tool in the list for a Module, but also embedded/linked it from that week's Page, then if students accessed it from the Page it would NOT get 'checked off' in the Modules list. Thus, to make an external tool a Requirement for that week's Module, a student has to click on it in the Module list. But that would encourage students not to bother to read or work through the Page where I embedded it. (They can just click on that too and maybe mark it as 'Done', but not actually read it.)

That obviously completely undermines the point of having a richer, page-based VLE. Yet the Canvas servers are probably already logging, at least at the level of the HTTP server, students' clicks on each external tool link/embed. So in theory, the external tool could be marked as 'Done' in the Module list once a student had clicked on the identically-URL'd tool on the Page (or anywhere else in Canvas, come to that).

Not being able to do this has severely limited my and my students' use of Requirements and Prerequisites. 

Are there any ways around this problem?