Can Module Requirements be added to a course after the course End Date?

[dacarter]

One of the hazards of new instructors has just come to light for me. 

A Catalog-listed course was just reached End Date, and the instructor came to me asking why she is starting to get reports that her students did not receive certificates. A brief perusal of the course immediately indicated the cause.  No Modules had -any- Requirements defined. I have stressed over and over that Catalog will not be able to tell when a student has successfully completed a course without defined Requirements. 

First Question - Is it possible to add the module requirements after the End Date? (My first guess is: Impossible)

Second Question - Since all of the Students show up in Catalog Analytics->Enrollments as "Certificate Attainable", is there any way to generate the certificates manually?

My Last Resort will be to:

• Create a course shell in Canvas
• Create a Module "Get my Certificate" with one requirement: "View the Item"
• Create a Listing for the course - Make it "Free"
• Copy the Custom Certificate into the course, Edit as needed.
• Bulk-enroll the "successfully completed" students to the course.
• Students go into the new course and "View the Item".
• Students should get their certificate automatically

Any thoughts on whether my Last Resort scenario will work?

[jsowalsk · Accepted solution]

@dacarter If you need to provide the certificate manually, I would recommend downloading and editing the PDF. 

[KathyPalm]

I believe I've done this before, but I don't a perfect test case to give you exact steps but want to share some tips in case it can be of help as I know it is a pain to manually generate a lot of certificates.

If you do an API call to check completion of the course, does it show a completion date? In order to get a certificate from Catalog you must have at completion date so this is my main thing to check whenever we have certificate issues.

https://x.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/CanvasCourseID/bulk_user_progress

or
X should be your Institution name/URL and CanvasCourseID is the canvas course number (such as 123).
If you would rather look at an individual user than the whole cousre you can use this one, and USERID is the number you see in the URL in the people menu. ( https://x.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/CourseID/users/UserID/progress )

My guess is if there are no module requirements, it should show something like the following:

"error": {
"message": "No progress available because this course is not module based (meaning, it does not have modules and module completion requirements)."

If you see that error, and then add a module requirement that fits the course. After, do the API call again, you should see it changes to show their progress something like this:

[
{
"id": 216,
"anonymous_id": "60",
"display_name": "Student Test",
"avatar_image_url": "https://X.instructure.com/images/messages/avatar-50.png",
"html_url": "https://X.instructure.com/courses/321/users/216",
"pronouns": null,
"progress": {
"requirement_count": 1,
"requirement_completed_count": 1,
"next_requirement_url": null,
"completed_at": "2021-06-22T13:51:44Z"
}
}
]

If it doesn't show a timestamp after "completed_at", then the first trick is to make sure they have actually completed the requirements which you can check from the module progress page (https://X.instructure.com/courses/CanvasCourseID/modules/progressions) 

Maybe set it as something where you manually grade. When checking the API change now I added a requirement to score at least 75/100 on an assignment that was already graded.

Once you have a completion date, you could then go into the section details in Canvas, the one that is connected to your catalog listing, and change the end date to a date AFTER the last completion date, or just make it today's date.

With the Catalog Section Sync update that happened a month or two ago, that new date will then push back to Catalog and should allow for the certificate to generate. It might need a night to refresh if the completion timestamp is only from today, but the sync update has worked wonders for us in troubleshooting these kinds of things, whether we messed up on the requirements which caused the certificate error, or if the student finished the course late and we had to reset the dates for them.

Good luck 😃