[Assignments] Date should always be visible on assignments to students

[Chokichi]

Came across this oddity today. I'm participating in a course for teaching online, and I went to do one of the assignments. It's due today, but the due date just says: "Due Sunday by 11:59pm". Which Sunday? If you're going to simplify the date, it should say Due Today by 11:59pm. This could be misinterpreted as next Sunday, because nobody talks like that.

"When are you coming over?"

"Sunday at 3:00pm"

Looks at watch

"I thought you were coming over today?"

"Yeah, today is Sunday. Why are you confused?"

[Stef_retired]

Thanks for sharing this feedback about how due dates display for students, @Chokichi . From which location in Canvas did you capture the screenshot?

[Chokichi]

This was on an assignment. 

[drewb1988]

Just came here to say I completely agree with this.

[Chokichi]

Here's a better image of what I'm talking about. My first response today was panic because yesterday was Friday, but then it would say late wouldn't it? Or would it? That's the exact confusion I could see a student having.

[James]

@Chokichi 

When I look at an assignment (in student view) that was due yesterday, it shows the complete date, not the shortened form. It will not say "late" as late is reserved for assignments that were turned in after the due date. It did say "missing" though as that is the term for assignments past their due date that have not been submitted. Not all assignments will say "missing" though, it depends on whether something is submitted to Canvas.

When today is Sunday and I look at an assignment (again in student view) that is due next Sunday, it provides the complete date rather than the shortened version.

[Chokichi]

@James Interesting, so the full date is shown when there's longer than a week between the current day and the due date? That's good to know, but I still don't see a good reason to ever exclude the exact date with month and day.

[James]

I'm a full-date kind of person and cringe when people release notes from committee meetings without the year. I'm also the person who puts the year first, then month, then date, so that it is sortable by date.

On the other hand, many of my students (and I teach college) have no idea what the actual date is. If you say "Sunday, November 28" (today as I write this) that doesn't register any more than "Sunday, December 5." On the other hand, by saying "Sunday", it puts an immediacy to it -- it's this week, it's right now, it's not some abstract date off in the future or in the past. It's something you should pay attention to.

Last semester, I had the full date on all of my discussions and assignments. This semester I removed them and just went with Wednesday and Saturday for the discussion. Why? For me, it was difficulty in updating from semester to semester. I kept on finding assignments I had missed and the instructions said the initial post was due in April. It's also because I realized the full date was unnecessary. Many of my students don't go into the weekly resources page, they use the To Do list and/or Calendar to jump straight to the assignments. And most don't go back to things after they're over to check on them or get the feedback that I left them that would help them do better on the next assignment that builds on the previous one.

As for "today" vs "Sunday," I prefer Sunday. Some of us have students in different time zones. Last semester I had a student in Thailand (our college is in Illinois, United States). It may be easier for that student to correctly identify the due date for "Sunday at 11:59 pm" than "Today at 11:59 pm." "Today" is too localized and it may not actually be "today." I showed that particular student how she could change the timezone in Canvas to match her local time, but she decided it was easier for her to keep it in the course time rather than her time. That way, any written instructions that included a date or time didn't conflict with the time that Canvas was showing.

[Chokichi]

Thank you for that perspective. This is my first semester teaching, and I'm always happy to learn from those with more experience. I try to have my assignments always due on the same day of the week for this reason, and I've heard from my students as well that if it's not on the to do list they don't do it. 

I'm not going to suggest that a toggle is added somewhere in the setting since Canvas already suffers, in my opinion, from too many options. I think that using "Today" rather than "Sunday" would still work for people in different time zones since Canvas could make the appropriate adjustment based on the assigned due date and the student's entered or detected time zone. 

[James]

Good point about the adjustment by Canvas for "Sunday" vs "Today."

I still think that "Sunday" is preferable. Showing "Today" when it is the current date may not give them much time at all. If something is due at 11:59 pm Chicago time, then it's due at 12:59 am New York Time. Let's say that student has changed their time zone to be New York time (their local time). Showing "Monday at 12:59 am" works all week long, while showing "Today at 12:59 am" only shows for 59 minutes. That is, they wouldn't see "today" at all unless they were up working on the assignment after midnight.

For my student in Thailand, my Sunday at 11:59 pm is actually Monday at 12:59 pm (13 hours ahead). If she gets up Monday morning and sees "Today at 11:59 pm" (she didn't change her timezone to local time), she might think she had all day to get the assignment done, when she really only had until almost 1pm her time.

There's another issue with relative times like "today." It encourages a countdown of relative dates -- "due tomorrow at 11:59 pm" and then "due today at 11:59pm." For those of who are frequently up at midnight working on things, it is easy to lose track of the time and the "due today" that it would say at 12:00am might make me freak out temporarily more than having the day of the week in there.

The relative dates (tomorrow, today) doesn't fix the issue of non-end-of-day times getting shorter todays than other assignments. You cannot say "today" on Sunday at 1:00 pm when it is due Monday at 12:59 pm, even though it is less than 24 hours until it's due. Today doesn't mean in the next 24 hours, it means the current calendar day.

I guess another reason I'm opposed to "Today" is from a programming perspective. Although it's not a due date, I've written code that allows sorting the roster page by the time the student was last in the course. The dates are hard enough to parse (no support for internationalization) with the short forms that Canvas uses. Adding "Today" to that mix makes it even harder because then I have to check time zones as well. What would be nice is if Canvas would include a data property that had the full date in ISO8601 format that allowed for sorting, but they don't. You might say that's a different situation so it should be handled differently, but standardization and consistency are important.

The issue of a toggle is something that Canvas tries to avoid. In April 2017 (seems like a lifetime ago now), I spent a day at their headquarters in Salt Lake City and talked to some of the leadership. That gave me a clearer understanding of what they were trying to accomplish. They try to limit the configuration options and they have a lot fewer options than other software does. The purposefully try not to do everything. They limit the options by coming up with what they hope are reasonable choices that work for the majority of the users. If it isn't intuitive, then it increases the experience people have with the product and the more support that needs done. They don't always succeed in that area and other times they decide that there isn't good way to do something and so they don't do anything rather than doing something poorly. It's frustrating for those who like to see improvements quickly and those who came from a different LMS that did try to do everything.

Still, if the toggle was to go anywhere, it should go under the user preferences not the course preferences. Too many faculty try to force their preferences onto the student. In many ways, Canvas tries to limit this by limiting the HTML that can be used or making it difficult to do things.  Faculty use tables designed for their 1920x1080 resolution monitor and it looks crappy on a student's smart phone that doesn't support that resolution. I'm not saying faculty are malicious, just that most are experts in the content, but not the design. One area Canvas made a compromise was with the course cards: faculty can force a course card, but they cannot force students to all use the same color for their overlay. If you put the option to use "Today" into the user preferences, most students would never see it, let alone change it. And then it's a case of adding cruft to the system for something that doesn't really benefit very many people.

Something that was attempted, and some are disappointed that it went away, was the ability to send notifications to students when an assignment was about due but the student hadn't submitted it yet. That had potential, especially if students opt into it. Some were opposed to it as seeming too invasive.