Using Prerequisites and Requirements

[garciah]

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.

[kona]

I use requirements the same way in my course. Just as a way for students to easily see what they have and haven't done each Module. We also use it this way in our Instructor Training course.

We use it with the prerequisites (so both) in our Student Orientation course because we do need/want students to work through the material on their own, but in a specific order.

I've got another Instructor at our College who just started making it to where students had to get a certain score on an outline before they could move forward in the class. They could resubmit to get a higher grade, but they couldn't move forward until they got that grade. The Instructor is already getting higher quality results on the assignments after the outline because the students now have a correct outline before moving forward in the course! 🙂

[garciah]

Great, thank you for the scenario!

[kona]

Here's a blog I wrote on how I use requirements for my course - https://community.canvaslms.com/people/kona‌

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @kona ‌

Thanks for writing this up so nicely in your Blog. I have now added it as a "How-To" doc in my Canvas toolbox for faculty.

Great job!

Agent K

[kona]

I just took what  @tom_gibbons ‌ originally came up with and did some further testing/research on how it worked with different scenarios. Overall it's a pretty simple hack that works quite well!

[ksbernard]

Can you have the assignment within the module close if its a prerequisites of a new module?

[hasti]

I made an academic conduct quiz about what kinds of activities were allowed in the course and what were not (with links to pages about course policies) and gave them an unlimited number of attempts at it (with it set up so they were not shown the correct answers after any attempt).

Then I made a Homeworks module and put links to the assignments within that module and set a prerequisite that the student could not access the module until they had gotten a perfect score on the academic conduct quiz.

This way, they had a very tangible incentive to read over and think about the academic conduct guidelines for the course.

[scain]

This is an excellent idea! I was wondering what the use case for Requirements without Prerequisites would be, but I hadn't thought about that check mark. That definitely makes sense. I'll have to keep that in mind when I meet with faculty in the future.

[mmrasmussen]

I am hopeful that some day we will be able to add requirements to individual items within a module and not just to modules themselves. I know this suggestion is on the project radar, but I'd love to see it sooner rather than later.

[scain]

How is that different than it is right now? The requirements are applied at the module level, but they still refer to individual items in the module.

[mmrasmussen]

My understanding is that the requirement is applied to an item in the module, but that will result in the opening of a new module. I want to be able to assign a requirement to an assignment within a module and have it open another item in that same module.

[Stef_retired]

 @mmrasmussen , you can do that by setting a score requirement on the item; students won't be able to progress to the next item in the module until they achieve a certain score on the item.

[nedwards7]

Can you please tell me where you go to make a score requirement I can't find it.

[kona]

 @nedwards7 , this guide explains what you need to do - https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13134-415261967 

[nedwards7]

Thank you for your answer but is there a way to have an assignment or quiz

not open until a requirement is done elsewhere in the module?

Thanks,

Nick

On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 6:38 AM, kona@richland.edu <instructure@jiveon.com>

[kona]

Within the same module you would either need to have students do things in order (this is a checkbox option when setting up prerequisites and requirements) and have the quiz after the thing you want them to do first. Or, depending on what you want students to have to do first, possibly use a mastery path - https://community.canvaslms.com/people/kona‌.

[scain]

I've just been using the "sequential order" checkbox to achieve this...though looking into the idea you referred to, that is not as robust as what you are looking for.

[mchild76]

Similar to how others have mentioned using requirements and prerequisites - In our online undergraduate/graduate course if there is an extra piece of software, streaming video, or hardware (for audio/video) they'll need; we always include information on accessing those materials in a course information module. Students often miss this - particularly if they are in an online degree program and are comfortable with Canvas. 

Using requirements we identify the "need to know" information that must be viewed and set the course information module as a prerequisite for all other modules in the course. This speed bump slows students down and points them directly to the information they need. This setting is helpful since students have access to the courses two weeks before the term and faculty are not always available to provide this information when students need to know it.

[kona]

Off topic, but on, here's a hack for how Instructors can bypass requirements/prerequisites for individual students - https://community.canvaslms.com/people/kona 

[jjulius]

Hi,  @garciah ‌ - did you ever complete your guide? I'd love to see it. I've spent some time messing around with Requirements and viewing various documentation and I haven't found anything I'd consider ideal in describing the different use cases, which to me seem quite varied and distinct. I also think it would be very easy for most faculty to misunderstand just how Requirements work at first blush and either to set it up incorrectly or to ignore it when it could be useful to them.

Broadly, I see three use cases:

1. Set Requirements within a module, but do not require sequential completion and do not set a Prerequisite of completion of that module in a future module. The value here is described above in this thread - that it then helps students and/or instructors to track student progress through the module. What's potentially confusing is that even though the instructor is selecting that "Students must complete ..." there really is no mechanism that enforces completion of the Requirement(s) without also selecting sequential completion and/or a corresponding Prerequisite in a subsequent module. A more specific name for this might be "Progress Tracking Requirements"

2. Set Requirements within a module and require sequential completion. This seems to me the most "natural" and least confusing way to understand Requirements - that within a module you must complete the required item before moving on to the next item. A more specific name for this might be "Within-module Completion Requirements".

3. Set Requirements within a module and set a Prerequisite completion of that module in a future module. A more specific name for this might be "Between-module Completion Requirements". Where I think there could be confusion with this use case is setting up a Prerequisite and not realizing that in order for that to mean anything, there must be Requirements set up in the other module. It seems natural to assume that if I am saying completion of the other module is a Prerequisite, then I would expect that the student would have had to at least complete any assignments, etc. within that other module. It would be great if Canvas warned someone who set up a Prerequisite for a module which contained no Requirements that the Prerequisite is meaningless until those Requirements are established.

If anyone takes the time to read this and notices I have misunderstood something, please set me straight!

[garciah]

Hi Jim Julius,

Yes, I did, but I kept it pretty basic. I have attached it to my original post. The scenarios provided in this thread have been really helpful when I talk about using prerequisites and requirements with faculty.

I absolutely agree with your comment:

It would be great if Canvas warned someone who set up a Prerequisite for a module which contained no Requirements that the Prerequisite is meaningless until those Requirements are established.

I've actually seen courses that have prerequisites, but no requirements. Explaining to faculty how prerequisites and requirements work together is challenging, but providing examples helps.

There are two ways I see this feature used most often:

1. Faculty have a syllabus quiz, honor code, or pretest in an early module, and they want to make sure that students can't progress in the course, until they have completed this requirement.
2. Faculty use requirements so that students can track their progress.

While some faculty lock down their course by setting up a lot of requirements and prerequisites, in my experience, more faculty prefer to allow students some self-direction in the order that they complete their course.

[jfrielich_ls]

My students love getting the checkmarks. Its difficult to remember to add all of the items to the prerequisite, but the students will always remind me when it doesn't make the green checkmark. 

[awilliams]

Hello  @garciah . Because your question may not necessarily have one "correct" answer, I have changed your posting from a "Question" to a "Discussion."  I hope this is okay with you.

[jlh502]

Where is the file?

[Bryan-L]

Can you please relink the file?  It cannot be viewed in the viewer, and when downloaded, there is an error "Failed - No file." 

[nssteeves]

Thank you for your Guide--it answered my question.

[cholling]

In encourage faculty to use the prereqs and locking so that students must review the getting started module that includes Canvas getting started guides, class policies, standard university policies that they need to be aware of, and a single-item syllabus affirmation "quiz" (stating that they have read, understood and/or asked questions until things were clear) before unlocking the remainder of the class modules.

[nssteeves]

Awesome idea! Thank you for sharing