Adjusting announcement dates during course copy not working??

[chriscas]

Hi @DanielBarwick,

Could you possibly post a screenshot of what the announcements area in your current course looks like, along with the dates area of one specific announcement when in edit mode?

What I think you may be seeing is a result of how the announcements may have been done in the original course and how you import them over.  If the announcements have no dates or the dates are in the past and you just import those without adjusting dates, the "posted on" does appear to end up blank.  That doesn't mean that students can't see the announcements, but they wouldn't get an email/app notification because there is no date or it's in the past.  If the announcement date in the original course is in the future though, you should see that come over and be displayed as a "delayed until".  In addition, if your announcements have dates in the original course and you adjust the dates as part of the import to make the new announcement be in the future, you should also see that new date as a "delayed until"

Here's are example screenshots from my tests:

Original course:

New course:

The "Hi" announcement had an available from date set in the past.  So when I imported it to the new course, there is no date shown on the main announcement screen because the "post" was in the past so never really happened in the new course. 

The "The future" announcement has an original "available from" date in the future, and that imported and shows the same future date in the new course.

The "The past to the future" announcement had an "available from" date set as May 1 in the original post.  it shows as posted July 1 because I just created it today for testing purposes.  When I imported that announcement into the new course, I adjusted the dates and chose to adjust May 1 to Aug 7.  That caused that announcement to get the "delayed until" applied on the main announcement screen.

If you want announcements to be posted on a schedule for your new course, the key seems to be to ensure the announcements in the original course have an "available from" date set on them, and to use the adjust dates feature during the import to ensure all of the adjusted announcement dates will be in the future.

I hope this makes a bit of sense and helps you a bit.  If you don't have "available from" dates set, that may be a big task to go add, but it would definitely help out if you plan to reuse those announcements for multiple future courses.

-Chris

 

[DanielBarwick]

Chris, thanks so much for the help!

Here's the first screenshot you asked for:

Here is the second:

I don't normally have an "until" date, because I want the announcement to be available for the remainder of the course.

Do these images affect your diagnosis at all? Thank you again for the help.

Dan

[chriscas]

Hi @DanielBarwick,

Thanks for your screenshots.  It appears you do have the "available from" dates populated, which is awesome!

From my experience and testing results yesterday, the key part to having the dates appear on the announcements index page in the new course is to use the adjust dates feature during the import.  When using that feature, you'll need to set the original beginning date to something that's before the first announcement you're importing, then the "change to" should be something that will ensure the adjusted announcement date(s) will be in the future...  Let me give you an example...  If you're importing an announcement that originally was available from Jan 03, 2025, you could select any date before that as your original beginning date.  For this example I'll choose Jan 1, 2025 in that box.  The in the "change to" box for the beginning date, I need to choose something that would make the announcement date be in the future.  Since I chose Jan 1 as the original date and the announcement was on Jan 3 (2 days later), that means I could select July 1 or after (as of today), which would cause the new announcement date to be July 3 or later.

Because o the date complexities, you'll generally want to do this importing before your class begins, that way you can select all announcements and set the import dates as the start date for the original course and the start date of the new course.

Hopefully this makes some sense.  Even though it seems complicated to type it all out this way, is should be fairly easy to actually do once you get the hang of the right way to set up the dates!

-Chris

[DanielBarwick]

Chris, it appears that the maximum file size I can attach is 5MB, which isn't a good match for a screen vid. I uploaded a response vid to my class Youtube page, and here's a link to that vid:

https://youtu.be/6fBAKhnXLqY?si=SorrRyAhfbKpON0h

Again, thanks so much for the help!

Best,

Dan

[chriscas]

Hi @DanielBarwick,

I think you're almost there!  You need to have both the left and right boxes populated.  There are basically telling Canvas by how much to shift the date(s) and I don't think the shift functions properly unless the left and right side are both populated.  The left box should have a date that corresponds to the "old" course.  The box on the right would be the new course (which Canvas is helpfully populating for you).  Since Canvas is populating the right box with your new course start date, if you populate the left box with the source course start date, you should get the dates you desire (or something close, if the original course started on a Monday and the new starts on a Wednesday, the date adjustments may not be perfect).  Here's an example:

You can probably leave the ending dates blank unless the two courses were taught over completely different timeframes (a 7 week course vs a 14 week course, for example) where you'd want Canvas to try to expand or compress the announcement dates.

I hope this adds a little clarity and may get things working how you'd like!

-Chris

 

[DanielBarwick]

Chris, one more brief video response for you:

https://youtu.be/y5mBsytbJ4w?si=rb1GnjiIew6U6EMf

Thanks again for the help!

[chriscas]

Hi @DanielBarwick,

I have to say that I'm somewhat stumped at this point...  Putting all of the info from your posts and videos together, I'm not able to replicate what you're showing.  The only ways I get blank dates on the assignments index page when importing in our instance are 1 - if there is no "available from" date in the original course, or 2 - the "available from" date would end up being in the past when importing (either because of not adjusting dates, or because of adjustment settings that would still result in the announcement available from being before the import).

I'm wondering if anyone else in the community may be able to check this out and either find a step that I'm missing myself or maybe something that we're both somehow overlooking.  I wish I had a better answer, but I'm afraid this is all I can say at this point.

-Chris