Catalog early-bird pricing?

[dacarter]

In Catalog, I haven't seen the ability to create a date/time-based pricing structure, specifically, early-bird pricing. Is there any plan to add this as a feature?  I thought I would just create 2 listings for the same course with the different prices and use the Start/End dates for the listings to control the early-bird cutoff.  Of course, it looks like you can only list a course once, so that was not feasible. A Promotion Code could work, but there are headaches associated with those who just don't use the code, and then staff having to "fix" things through the payment backend.

[kevinhitt]

Hello @dacarter , 

That is a great question, and you are correct - there is no built-in option for different price structures / early-bird pricing in Canvas Catalog (to my knowledge). 

My office has implemented Catalog for over 4 years, and our recommendation would be to either implement promotion codes like you mention - or better yet set the initial price as the Early Bird price, then (manually) have someone update the price to the higher amount on the date which the Early Bird rate expires. 

While this could technically be automated via a script + the Catalog API, we have fortunately had the bandwidth to quickly update any Early Bird prices on the morning of the switch. 

My advice would be to avoid using multiple Catalog listings for the same offering, as this would require multiple Canvas course environments, potentially complicating both the student experience and the admin/management of the students. 

I hope you can find a solution that makes it easy on your staff, please let me know if I can assist. 

P.S. feel free to submit Instructure Community Ideas (i.e. Catalog suggestions) here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/forums/postpage/board-id/canvas-ideas/search-before-post-mode/tru...

Best, 
Kevin Hitt
USF Corporate Training and Professional Education 

[hechla]

As I read through this I started wondering (and probably outside the scrope of the question) if you could have two courses in Canvas (and therefore two listings in Catalog) but have the section from one course cross-listed into the other and would that "hack" work to allow two pricing structures for the same offering? 

Personally, I like @kevinhitt's answer of just setting the early bird price and then manually changing it when the early bird period ends. But it got me thinking. 

[jsowalsk]

@dacarter You could try to utilize sections to be able to parse out the awarding.