Delay course invitations

[JBranahl]

I know there is a feature to restrict course participation to within the section's start and end dates. It would be nice if there were also a feature to delay the actual course invite until the section dates (or maybe even a customizable date range, such as "within X days of section start date"). 

Here's how it affects us. We roster our courses/sections at the start of the year. Students get invites for courses they won't participate in for another 6 months. Sure, they can only view the course in read-only mode, but it still shows up in their courses as an active course. This can cause confusion for them at the start of the year when they are still trying to figure out which courses they are in and how to interact with those courses in Canvas. Likewise, teachers get stressed out when they see notifications for 90 kids accepting invitations to a course that should only have 30 at a time. 

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @JBranahl,

I found this old thread while doing a community cleanup.

This sounds more like a feature idea than a question, so you could always post in the ideas area if you'd like Instructure to somehow adjust Canvas.  With that being said, as a Canvas admin myself, it seems like your school/institution may be doing things in a somewhat unusual way and that may be the root cause of the problem.  In most cases, when using automated process to enroll students into courses/sections, there is no invitation generated for students to accept.  Second, if you're using a single Canvas course shell for multiple different sections with vastly different (6 months) dates, I think there is always going to be come confusion.  If most teachers at your school/institution agree, your team there may want to inverstigate using different course shells for each section.  There are plussed and minuses of that approach, but one of the plusses is that you shouldn't have this rolling enrollment / large people list issue.  Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.

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