Dynamic Assignment Due Dates in Announcements

[GanaNatarajan]

Caveat: This might be a highly specialized thing that only I do and might not be entertained as a feature request; but I thought I would ask.

User Role: Instructor

I have the habit of sending weekly Announcements - usually timed to go out at 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning. One of the sections in that Announcement is a Deliverables and Deadlines section. That section would list a few upcoming Assignments/Deliverables (using the Course Links) so that the assignment portals are directly accessible if they click on it.

Here is where my ask is. I manually enter the assignment due date every time. And when I roll my course over to a different semester and adjust dates, I will have to manually change the dates on each of the announcements. Also, if I change a deadline from one Announcement to another, I have to remember to fix it to avoid causing confusion.

Is there currently a feature or is there a chance there can be a feature, where any time we want to cite/quote the due date for an assignment, there is a dynamic field/ dynamic tag that can show the "Everyone" due date at the least? I understand this may cause issues when assigning to specific students or to different sections or with mastery paths kind of things. But if there a JS trick or a CSS trick currently I would be interested in learning.

Gana

[JamesSekcienski · Accepted solution]

@GanaNatarajan 

I am not aware of a feature in Canvas to show the due dates for assignments dynamically.  To suggest a new feature request, be sure to check out the Canvas Ideas. If this Idea hasn't been submitted already, you can submit a new Idea for this request.

In the meantime, if you or your school has the resources available you could investigate trying to build a customization to offer this functionality.  It will be important to take into consideration how it would display in notifications and the mobile apps too.  You can also check-out the Canvas Developers group, but I don't think I have seen any user scripts shared to provide this feature.  This group can serve has a helpful resource if you/your school do decide to try to develop your own solution for this.

You may also want to consider directing students to the Syllabus (if you have the Course Summary enabled) and/or the course calendar for the due dates rather than including them directly in the announcement. How do I use the Syllabus as an instructor? 

[PaulNagami]

I've tried to work out something like this on assignments pages -- embedding an updatable piece of HTML that could be changed from one shared location if I update instructions, etc. But there are many barriers to doing it that way efficiently. (Many of them are quite understandable! We don't want scripting vulnerabilities.)

I THINK this would be theoretically possible using the Canvas API, Python, and a spreadsheet of assignments + dates. What you'd do is write a Python program that takes a bunch of templates for the annoucements and then manually replaces them every term with new versions with your updated dates.

However, despite its tremendous power, the Canvas API is full of little traps and challenges! Writing a program that let me spreadsheet grade Canvas Quizzes was challenging, so I'm not ready to take on the problem of making a helper for automating Announcement updates.