Is there a way to control/enforce course pacing?

[dkamakura]

I'm managing a continuing education (CE) course for school nurses, which awards 1.5 CE credit hours upon completion. However, in order to give them credit, we have to make sure they are actually spending at least 90 minutes on the course. That means:

• No skipping through content,
• No fast-forwarding through videos,
• No watching the videos at double speed, etc.

Right now, the only way to do this that we've come up with is to manually check the timestamps at each stage of the course for each student, to make sure that they plausibly line up with the minimum amount of time they could/should have spent for each module. For example, if a student first views a page at 12:00:00pm, and then completes a 21-minute module at 12:09:00pm, we know that they didn't actually watch the videos, and can't award them completion credit. Similarly, if they just mark each page complete in less than an hour after enrolling/registering, we know they couldn't possibly have completed the entire course, because just viewing the content requires at least 90 minutes.

As you can imagine, this is extremely tedious and time-consuming on our end, because it involves manually tracking each student's timestamps and calculating the time-elapsed by hand, and then following-up with students to remind them to go back and watch the videos and review the material that they skipped.

I know there is a way to make assignments "unlock" at a certain time and date, but the way our course is structured we have rolling registrations and enrollments--thus, people can join the class at any time, any day of the year.

Is there a way to automatically lock a module or assignment based on when an individual student first accesses the course materials--whenever that happens to be--to prevent them from skipping ahead? For example, if a student first views Module 1 at 12:00:00pm, I want to prevent them from advancing to Quiz 1 until at least 12:21:00pm, so they are forced to spend the minimum amount of time necessary before advancing to the next section. Or better yet, I'd like a way to lock Quiz 1 until they finish watching Embedded Video 1 to completion, however long that ultimately takes, without being able to fast-forward or speed up the video, or click "Next" and skip the video page entirely.

[ProfessorBeyrer · Accepted solution]

Canvas Studio is a good recommendation, especially if you use the Canvas Studio Quizzes. The Studio Guide linked by @TrishaMeyer1 includes documents on this feature. I worked with a colleague at my college this semester who wanted to ensure that his students watched every minute of his recorded lectures, and I suggested using Canvas Studio Quizzes. It puts questions within the video at a time set by the instructor, but a student cannot submit the quiz until they watch to the end of the video. This does not prevent students from skimming through the video between the quizzes. However, if you use plenty of questions and make them hard to answer without a careful watch of the video, your students will be encouraged to spend time in the video. You can use that feature in combination with the prereqs and requirements. For example, you could require that students get a perfect score on the Canvas Studio Quiz before they can advance to the next item in the module.

[masantos]

Hello,

I don't believe there is this level of control available in Canvas. There are other tools like EdPuzzle (may need pay) that allows you to have more control over how a student interacts with a video. I recommend posting this as a Canvas Idea feature request. 

[TrishaMeyer1]

Hi @dkamakura ,

I'm not sure if you can do exactly what you want, but you can use Requirements and Prerequisites on your modules to do most of what you are asking. If you have Canvas Studio, I think you may be able to control the video portion as well by placing interactive content within the videos and requiring the videos to play straight through.

Here is some information about Requirements and Prerequisites:

How do I add prerequisites to a module?

How do I add requirements to a module?

And here is some information about Canvas Studio:

Studio Guide Table of Contents

[dkamakura]

We've already set up the "Prerequisites" to be the previous module in the series, but perhaps we need to do something with the "Requirements," to force students to interact with each page before they are able to click "Next." The main issue is, the way the course pages are currently set up, students are able to click "Next" regardless of whether the video even plays, allowing them to complete a 90-minute course in less than half that time.

I'm not familiar with Canvas Studio, but I'll look into it. If there is a way to lock the page and disable the "Next" button until the video has run its course, that would definitely be a huge help.

[ProfessorBeyrer · Accepted solution]

Canvas Studio is a good recommendation, especially if you use the Canvas Studio Quizzes. The Studio Guide linked by @TrishaMeyer1 includes documents on this feature. I worked with a colleague at my college this semester who wanted to ensure that his students watched every minute of his recorded lectures, and I suggested using Canvas Studio Quizzes. It puts questions within the video at a time set by the instructor, but a student cannot submit the quiz until they watch to the end of the video. This does not prevent students from skimming through the video between the quizzes. However, if you use plenty of questions and make them hard to answer without a careful watch of the video, your students will be encouraged to spend time in the video. You can use that feature in combination with the prereqs and requirements. For example, you could require that students get a perfect score on the Canvas Studio Quiz before they can advance to the next item in the module.

[ProfessorBeyrer · Accepted solution]

Hello again, @dkamakura. There is another option that is worth exploring. Instructure is developing a feature for course pacing. I don't see that it yet tracks time, which you specifically mention. However, it is a feature that is in development. That means Instructure's developers are interested in collecting feedback from and will respond to users who are exploring how it works:

Course Pacing (Feature Preview)