[Account Settings] Ability for Admin to set Student/Teacher/TA/Designers Term End dates to "whenever"

[ashley_hardesty]

Here's something that's irk'ed me for a few years...

We allow access by Students and Instructors to the last 9 semesters of courses.  We always have this issue for Instructors when a Term Ends:

"I have a document I need to update in my course, but since the Term has ended, I only have Read-Only access to the course, and cannot make changes."

The desired solution here would be to simply set the term end date for Teachers to "whenever", so they can make the changes they need.

Right now, I need to add an end date that extends to the end of the year:

...which is not ideal.

..and, I don't want to set the Term Runs from end date to "whenever", since the term would always be considered a "Current Term".

[Stef_retired]

@ashley_hardesty 

Thanks for sharing this idea. As it moves forward for broader discussion, we encourage you to post a question about this to the Admin group hub to see if your fellow experts have devised a creative solution.

[ashley_hardesty]

How do other institutions allow student access to course material, after the Term date has passed?

[MrWilliams]

Just went to go add this idea myself and saw that you had already brought it forward. This seems like such a simple fix that would save so much energy by providing more open access!  Support, support, support!

[milesl]

This is critical, now that Instructure is forcing term dates to be used by default (and visible to instructors).

We've always set arbitrarily-early (several years in the past) term start dates to allow instructors complete control over when a course is visible/accessible to students. This worked great when availability defaulted to the (blank) course dates. Now that term dates are used by default, instructors must change the settings to course in order to fully publish a site. In order to minimize confusion, we'll need to set semi-accurate term start dates, which will likely be too conservative for instructors who want their courses to be ready before the term begins.