Multiple Sections for Same Course - how to prevent people from enrolling multiple times

[chris-thompson]

We are offering a self-paced asynchronous course which is open for users to complete throughout the year.  We are planning to have three different sections (Fall, Winter, and Spring) as completing the course makes users eligible to receive a continuing education credit (in which my organization has to manually submit rosters).  It is NOT required that they complete the course within the same term in which they register.  We have a couple of questions regarding this:

1) Since the course will be open all year, how can we prevent someone from completing the course multiple times?  Or unenrolling and re-enrolling to get multiple credits for the same course?

2) We will be submitting credit rosters of those who have completed the course periodically throughout the year.  Would you recommend that we have different sections based on when people register for the course?  Or once we've submitted a roster for one of the credit terms would we manually put those people in a separate section of "course completers" so we know not to include them on the next round of credit rosters?  We just don't want to have people mistakenly receive credits for something that they did not do.

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@chris-thompson For your first question, removing a person from a course, whether they do it or you do it, does not reset the student.  All of their previous work would come back so they would not be able to do it again.  I would have a least a quiz or something that has a single attempt and use this as the way (or at least one way) to know they completed the work.  This could be as simple as a quiz question saying they are signing off that they completed the work and then they type their name as the signature.  Once they have done this once, there is no way for the student to do it again so they could not complete the course multiple times with the hope of getting more credits.

For your second question, this would have to be done manually, as you suggested, but I think it is a great idea.  I do the same thing for a rolling Professional Development course we have.  Currently Canvas does not offer a way for you to force which section students are enrolled in when you use the enroll link or button method.  I know that is a feature request right now so if that gets added, that would be an option for you down the road.

Hope this helps!

Nick

[chris-thompson]

Thank you so much for your swift feedback Nick!  I didn't realize that an individual's progress continued to stay with their account even if they were to unenroll and re-enroll later.  That is really great information to be aware of.  Each of our modules do have a quiz that they are expected to complete before advancing to the next module (so we at least have that layer of protection).  

As for the assigning of individuals to sections, Canvas can automatically assign only based on date of enrollment (so if you had non-overlapping dates for each section then it would place each person in the section that corresponds to their date of enrollment, but if they overlap in dates at all then it would not be able to).  Hopefully the feature request goes through as that could be pretty helpful I would think.