Set Assignment Default Due Time

[mwade]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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We are a K-12 school. One of the biggest negative feedback items we receive on Canvas has to do with assignments being due at midnight (11:59). Parents are concerned that we effectively asking them to stay up until midnight to turn in their homework. This is especially important for our middle school and junior high students.

We would like to be able to set assignment due time to default to a time that can be set in our school's account settings.

Yes, it is true that teachers can change the time, but we are relying on them doing the extra steps all the time to match our school's assignment policy - and it requires a lot of clicks to make this simple change.

[fisher1]

There's other reasons I'm sure, but one reason I can think of is that Canvas uses the time to indicate if an assignment has been turned in late. If turned in past the due date, the cell in the gradebook will appear red, alerting teachers as to what assignments have been turned in late.

[msanders]

Have there been any additional updates from Instructure related to this issue?  The Gathering Info comment says "Expect a response within the next 30 days."  It *seems* like it's been more than 30 days since that comment was posted.  We really need this feature so I am anxious for this request to move forward. Thanks!

[steinert]

When I choose to have an assignment submitted on paper, Canvas should default the time for the due date to "in class" or "at the beginning of class". Having an 11:59 PM due time makes no sense for paper submissions!

[kmcgee]

Thank you  @mwade ​ for your feedback regarding default time for submissions to assignments. The discussion here is helpful and we'll certainly keep this in mind as we look to simplify assignment in the future. However, we won't be doing any adjustments to this functionality at this time. Thanks again for your time and for sharing your use cases.

[mwade]

This is very disappointing.

[fisher1]

Is there a Canvas project priority list available to the community? Because that would be very interesting to see what is trumping the "Set Assignment Default Due Time" request that has so many use cases.

[Renee_Carney]

 @fisher1 ​

You can find this information in the Canvas Studio​.

[ebonakdarian]

+100 here too .. I have three classes, assignments are due at the beginning of class, i.e., at 8:30am 10:30am and 12:30pm. I have about 30 to 40 assignments each semester, this means I have to enter these due times manually between 90 to 120 times, every semester - it's tedious, potentially error prone, and totally unnecessary. The computer should take care of the tedium.

Honestly, I don't understand why this isn't a feature already. As a computer scientist, it seems to me it would be relatively easy to implement and the effort to do that would be dwarfed by the time saving for all the uses. Please consider implementing this in the near future, you'll have a lot of grateful users.  Thank you!

[James]

 @ebonakdarian ​,

You might be able to benefit from Adjust All Assignment Dates on One Page​.

It's a Google Spreadsheet that loads all of the dates for assignments and quizzes for your course onto one page. You can then change the date/time of the assignments and send it back to Canvas.

While it wasn't designed to make a default time, it can be used for that purpose pretty easily. If you want all of your assignments to be due at 8:30 am, you could "Load Due Dates", then "Show Times", do a search/replace to find 23:59 and replace it with it 08:30 and then "Save Due Dates".  If you're already got the dates in Canvas without the times, then that will work. If you don't already have the dates in Canvas, you can set them in the spreadsheet and not mess with the Canvas interface.

I know it's not the same as having it built-in, but it could save you a lot of time on those 120 assignments.

[ebonakdarian]

Hi James,

Wow .. those instructions look impressive, and video too, thanks, I'll have to check it out. However, I suspect this may not work for me as I don't "front load" all assignments for the semester at once, but keep adding them one or two at a time for each different course as the semester progresses. I'd just be happy if Canvas could remember the previous settings (like it does for submission type and document type) - that in itself would be very helpful.

I will take a closer look at your documentation just in case though  - thanks for taking the time to do that and to reach out.

Esmail