Provide option to allow students to see courses in Future Courses but not click into them

[glparker]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea open for vote Wed. January 6, 2016 - Wed. April 6, 2016  Learn more about voting...

tl;dr - create a configuration option whereby students can see future enrollments listed in their course drop down menu but not click into those courses in any way

As described here What's the expected behavior of the course checkbox "Restrict students from viewing course before st...

It's important to note that this introduces a change to the behavior of settings from before the new options.  This change is undesirable for us.  The new settings broke what was for us a working system.

Previously, if I published a course, and checked the box "Users can Participate", students would see their course listed in Future Courses, but could not click to access the course.  This was the desired behavior.

Today, if I publish a course, check the box "Users can Participate", and leave unchecked "Restrict Students" (This is the default given our current settings and procedures), students can now access the course in a read-only mode.

If I instead publish the course, check the box "Users can Participate", and check the box"Restrict Students", the course is removed from the students list of Future Courses.    They cannot see that they are registered for the course.

We want our students to see they are enrolled in Future Courses, it provided a confirmation that they were properly registered for courses and were just waiting for the start of the course to begin.

As it is, there is no longer a way to manipulate the available settings to produce our desired behavior.

Please modify the behavior of the "Restrict Students" checkboxes to not hide the course from Future Courses or Previous Courses.

Please add a checkbox for those that want it to "Hide Course from students outside Term Dates"

  Comment from Instructure

February 2016 update

The Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-02-20)  have an update to the original implementation of this feature.

January 2016 update from Erin Hallmark

Posted to What's the expected behavior of the course checkbox "Restrict students from viewing course before st...

[kona]

I agree that this is a new and undesirable behavior for us as well. To cut down on confusion we would like for students to see their future enrollments under their courses, but not be able to access them until the course start date (or start of term - depending on the Institutional settings).

As it is now students can either see their courses under future enrollments and access/view all content if the course is published (which faculty do NOT want to happen) OR students can't see any of their courses under future enrollments (which isn't beneficial to students, faculty, or our help desk - confused students contacting us asking about whether their courses are in Canvas or not).

There is also another discussion about this issue that can be found here - Term dates no longer effective at preventing course access for students

[kmeeusen]

Gotta agree Kona, and I will vote for this.

Love Canvas, but sometimes their fixes create more headaches than what they were trying to fix ever did!

[curtain]

We agree as well. This introduced undesireable behavior for us and we are trying to figure out how to make changes to handle it

[scottdennis]

Hi  @glparker ​,

I took the liberty of adding a tl;dr or synopsis to your feature idea.  If you do not feel that it accurately reflects your intent, please change or remove it.

Thanks,

SD

[glparker]

That sums it up perfectly. 

Thanks, Glen

[millerjm]

These checkboxes ("Restrict students from viewing course before start date" and "Restrict students from viewing course after end date") had just been introduced while we were going through implementation so we were aware of them and how they functioned, and we had them configured properly.  There was a recent change that seems to have changed the functionality of them somehow. 

Before, it seemed to respect the dates listed in the terms "Students can access course from START to END" and they could see it in their course list but they could not ACCESS the course materials.  Now they can VIEW the course materials rather than getting the message that the course does not yet begin. 

Many of you have been on Canvas for a while so these checkboxes are "new" features for you.  I worked with our implementation consultant and spent a very long time figuring out how to get the combination of those checkboxes as well as term dates in order to make this work as we needed it to.  It probably would have been May that we configured these settings. 

Whatever recent change was made isn't due to the addition of these checkboxes because they have been there the entire time we have been using Canvas, configured exactly the same way.

Some of the CSM's are working to see what they can get done, but If this can't be corrected to work like it did until we all noticed this week, what do you all think of this mock-up?  I'm thinking that this makes it pretty clear what each setting does so there can't be any claims of ambiguous or incorrect technical writing. Please open up a ticket with support and contact your CSM so that they are aware that this is an issue that is affecting many of our institutions. 

Joni

[tdelillo]

Another reason that the read-only state for future enrollments is not desirable - The "read-only" state apparently registers module progression, if the module only contains viewable items (pages, files). I have seen at least one example of a course that has not started yet, but several students have "completed" half the modules.

[biray]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. January 6, 2016 - Wed. April 6, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[millerjm]

I think it also triggers as a login to the class, which could affect the data shown to faculty for "Last Date of Attendance" for financial aid reporting. 

[millerjm]

FYI - I've shared this with the Canvas Admins group to hopefully get some more votes for this.