Is there a way to tweak the Turnitin LTI to make all assignments due at the end of the term?

[tdelillo]

Since we moved to the new Turnitin LTI in January, one of the problems we have had is as follows:

• Instructor adds a due date in Canvas (ex. April 30, 2016)
• That due date is passed to the Turnitin settings for the assignment because we have the custom field (custom_duedate=$Canvas.assignment.dueAt.iso8601) in the root LTI configuration.
• Instructor assumes that the Turnitin due date is like the Canvas due date (i.e. by default allows late submissions) when the Turnitin due date actually functions like a lock ("until") date. So on May 1, the student can no longer submit anything on the Turnitin assignment dashboard.
• Confusion and tickets ensue.

We thought perhaps we could simplify things by having a custom parameter that would find the end date of the term in which the assignment was created, and send it to Turnitin as the due date for the assignment. But there's no straightforward way to do that. Anyone know of a way to use custom fields to do this, or have any other workarounds to suggest?

For reference, I got the customer parameters originally from the Canvas and Turnitin​ discussion.

[kona]

This is an interesting question and I'm going to tag  @dhulsey ​ to see if he has any experience with this or an idea on how to make it work.

[dhulsey]

Hi, Tracey! I am not a programmer, so I can't offer any advice about a custom code to sync the Turnitin due dates with the term end date in a Canvas course. The custom fields for Turnitin were written by engineers at Instructure as far as I know.

An easier way might be to tell your instructors to set up their Optional Settings the first time they use Turnitin, which includes a setting to accept late assignments:

Also, each instructor only has to do this once (unless the instructor wants different options for different assignments) because instructors can save the optional settings they like as defaults:

The other option is to remove the custom code that syncs due dates and have instructors set dates in Turnitin by hand, but that is more work for instructors.

[tdelillo]

Thank you. I was hoping for a more automated process, because our faculty were already unhappy with the additional settings since we moved from the API to the LTI. In general, I wish there was more documentation and clarity regarding which custom parameters are available. But your user-education solution will work.

[dhulsey]

Yeah, if nothing else, perhaps whomever developed the existing custom codes could develop a library of codes for institutions to use.

Also, a good feature request for TII is to enable local admins to set default optional settings that instructors could then change if they chose. Failing that, asking admins to vote on what the default options should be set to for a first time user would be nice.

TII will have reps at Instructurecon, and I plan to hunt them down and ask some questions.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @tdelillo ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie