What I did was use a topic as a syllabus as suggested. Since in my course students followed the same a schedule, I’d compress/expand stuff so that the current week’s information was easier to find.
I also used custom badges to track what they’d done. Each assignment (or “challenge” in my course parlance) had a tag associated with it, so when they posted with the tag (and, I think, I “liked” the topic) then they’d get the badge and I could use that to track what assignments they’d done. I had a script that would find the badge and update a cell in a spreadsheet which I could then upload directly to the LMS gradebook.