Extend Course for Individual Student

(13)
As an administrator, I would like the ability to extend a course past the course conclude date for an individual student, so that the student can make up the work for an Incomplete Grade. For example, at our institution, an Incomplete Grade may be issued to a student under extenuating circumstances (i.e. severe injury, death in the family, etc.). A student who receives an Incomplete Grade is expected to make up the course work within a few weeks of the actual course end date. As it is now, extending the course end date extends it for every member of the course, which can cause confusion for students who have successfully completed all of the objectives for the course. Enabling an administrator to selectively extend a course for a specific student would assist faculty in managing coursework for students who undergo difficult times during the regular period of instruction.

 

 

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39 Comments
A10001506
Community Novice

Great idea.

snugent
Community Champion

 @jason_hill  You can do this but it requires some manual work. What we do is create a section manually and move the student in the new section with the extended dates. The instructor will need to update due dates for the section. We then remove all the other students from course; however, with the new course restriction (per Canvas Release Notes) after concluding a course you may not have to do this. It works but like I said it is a manual process and if you have many incompletes this could be an issue. I would like to see this process automated so when the official paperwork is done in the sis the section is created in the same Canvas course where the student's work is already.

glparker
Community Champion

Hi snugent,

I like your out of the box thinking, but like you said, that's a lot of work.

I'd like it if course dates could work similar to how Moderating Quizzes work today.  I could have a Moderate Course button, and then I could modify start/end dates for individual students as needed, without affecting overall Course dates or Term dates.

PSU_Tony
Community Contributor

Wonderful idea!!

kona
Community Champion

We do the same thing that snugent​ does, but it would be great to have an EASY way to do this!

jtroupe
Community Novice

I would like to see this treated in the same way teacher's can moderate a quiz.  Teachers or administrators should be able to moderate assignments, discussions and the entire course on an individual student basis rather than having to create a new section, etc.

john_morris
Community Participant

I have been struggling with this concept with a new course I am teaching this term. It is the capstone for an MBA project and the university requires students to be actively enrolled when the project is completed... this essentially drives revenue for the university but demonstrates a lack of flexibility to the student. These projects are complex and have many moving parts... all it takes is for their project to go long by a week and they must re-enroll to complete. I would like to be able to tell the Registrar the student has an "I" extend the individual student's time in the course and then complete when the student has satisfied all requirements. In addition to demonstrating flexibility to the student, it would reduce the pressure on our graduate committee to accept the student's or require him/her to pay another term's worth of tuition.

KAilsa_Rowan
Community Novice

It's great to know there's this workaround but it requires someone with course creation access to set up the new section. At our university, only the registrar would be able to set up the Incomplete. So not only is it a lot of work, but also the work falls on a department which is already very busy enrolling people for the next quarter and doesn't have time to take on this extra work of creating and then monitoring a "special" section of the course. If the individual instructor could extend one student it would simplify everyone's life.

mfranz
Community Novice

This would be extremely useful for us. Right now we control student access by term dates which requires us to place a course in which a student is receiving an incomplete into a special "incomplete" term. This then leaves the course open to all students. Neither is unsurmountable but your idea would allow us to restrict/enable student access appropriately without having to keep track of multiple terms. To your point, it would be most helpful to be able to set an end date that allows that student additional access without the admins or instructor having to monitor it.

hvaughn
Community Contributor

A recent production release has made it easy for us to extend access to a course for a student with an incomplete, while restricting access for all other students.  On the admin level, we have activated the setting to "Restrict students from viewing courses after end date" as well as locked the setting for sub-accounts and courses so that instructors cannot override. 

We have an "Incompletes" form an instructor submits with the information about the student needing extended access, the course and section number, and the incomplete end date. We (the admins) handle this by manually creating an "Incomplete" section in the course and change the end date on the incomplete section to the date in which the student has to complete the missing work.  Then we add the student requiring extended access into the section.   When the course end date arrives all other students can no longer access the course.  However, the dates set on the incomplete section in the course override the course end dates to allow the student continued access.

jason_hill
Community Contributor

Yeah, we're doing a similar process based on some suggestions from the community. I hope we're able to handle these requests in a more efficient manner at some point in the future.

Allison_Ogrady
Community Explorer

I love this idea- it is so much extra work to make the accommodations for one student to continue the course. I would love to make this easier on the admin side.

buellj
Community Contributor

This is a great idea. We currently have term access dates for students that extend into the next term due to need for students to take care of incompletes; it would be great to extend just for the relevant student without impacting how the course appears for other students.

SHEBENE
Community Champion

That's what we do (but don't have to remove the other students as they conclude by course date) so this would be much easier.

594948
Community Novice

I agree!  This is definitely needed.  For what it is worth, I envision going into a course, selecting the “gear” next to the student where an option would be to extend course access.  Then a box would open up similar to the add a section box detail screens to allow dates to be entered. This would override any term or course dates so it would remain in the students active course list.  The instructor would stay enrolled a week longer than the student to allow time for the instructor to grade the materials ( or define the dates of instructor access as well).  All of this extending course options needs to be permission based as some schools might allow instructors to do it, other would require the proper administration to sign off and administrators to complete the steps.

e01166
Community Novice

This could be a very big deal for us. We have open enrollments within set terms. While the semester might end on December 21st we want students to finish the class. It gets a little further complicated since we'll be integrating with our SIS. We're going to have to figure something out there.

sriddle
Community Novice

Agreed!

datsupport
Community Explorer

Great idea as of right now we have to create a section within the course for the individual student and faculty.

allison
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Thanks, everyone, for your comments and examples. They are always so helpful. This idea overlaps with the rolling enrollment idea that has surfaced before (student specific start and end dates). It also overlaps with a general concern that users have expressed around workflows related to concluding terms, courses, sections, and enrollments.

After talking this over as a product team, we've decided to make researching course conclude workflows a priority during the next six months. It doesn't mean that we'll be able to resource it this year, but it does mean that we're committing to having a solid plan in place that we can begin to prioritize one phase at a time. I'm also going to work with our community team to identify feature ideas related to course conclude workflows. I'll be in touch shortly with a group link for voters, similar to the Canvas Focus Group: Printing Quizzes​ and Canvas Focus Group: Extra Credit​ we've recently launched.

Look forward to working with all of you to tackle this important issue.

jason_hill
Community Contributor

Hi Allison,

Any status update on this idea?

Thanks!