Scheduling a page for unpublication.

[NoahBoswell]

Hi there,

Is there a way to schedule a page for unpublication? I understand that there is a feature to schedule for publication, and I use it everyday. However after my class ends, I want pages such as study guide answer keys and things such as that to automatically unpublish from the modules.

If this isn't a feature, will it be soon?

Thanks,

Noah

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi @NoahBoswell ...

You are correct that there isn't a way to schedule a page to be unpublished from your course.  You would have to do this manually right now.  If you wanted, you could submit this as a new Idea here in the Community so that it could be potentially evaluated and maybe even implemented in Canvas.  (It has to go through the normal idea/voting process.)  Here's how to do this...starting with reviewing the links under the section "Ideas and Themes":

Instructure Community Guide - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Then go here to click on the blue "View and Submit Ideas" button on this page:

Canvas Ideas and Themes - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

On the next page, click on the blue "Submit an Idea" button.

I hope this helps...even though it's not the answer you were looking for.

[Chris_Hofer]

@NoahBoswell ...

Out of curiosity, when your course ends, do you have things configured in your course settings so that students cannot view content after the course end date?  On your course "Settings" page, under the fields for start and end dates, there is a checkbox for "Restrict students from viewing course after course end date".  Would that be a workable solution for you instead?

[NoahBoswell]

Hi Chris,

I do have those features on there, however I'm more focused on when the course is active. For example, if I post a study guide or sample questions and answers for my students in my modules on a page, when I go to publish that page under the module I have the option to Schedule for Publication. However at the end of the school day, I do not want students to have access to those resources, and I want the page to automatically unpublish. I was wondering if there was a way to do that.

I'll leave a picture below of what I'm talking about. I'm assuming there is no way to do this?

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi @NoahBoswell ...

You are correct that there isn't a way to schedule a page to be unpublished from your course.  You would have to do this manually right now.  If you wanted, you could submit this as a new Idea here in the Community so that it could be potentially evaluated and maybe even implemented in Canvas.  (It has to go through the normal idea/voting process.)  Here's how to do this...starting with reviewing the links under the section "Ideas and Themes":

Instructure Community Guide - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Then go here to click on the blue "View and Submit Ideas" button on this page:

Canvas Ideas and Themes - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

On the next page, click on the blue "Submit an Idea" button.

I hope this helps...even though it's not the answer you were looking for.

[NoahBoswell]

Sounds good, thanks for your help!

[lglen2]

This is not a solution. This is an indication that the requested feature does not exist, which does not solve OP's problem.

Why can we not schedule for unpublication? If we can schedule a "Publish" surely it can't be that hard to add the reverse...

And why do you keep referring people to request a feature? If that's still an upvoting system (which Instructure ignores), we are all just wasting our time.

[Chris_Hofer]

@lglen2 ...

---

This is not a solution. This is an indication that the requested feature does not exist, which does not solve OP's problem.

---

I'm sorry that you feel my feedback was not a solution.  However, reading again through the conversation between me and @NoahBoswell, it looks like he was appreciative of the help I provided on November 13, 2023.  It's very possible that Noah marked one of my responses as a "solution" because, for him, it did answer his question or provide a solution.  (In fact, he submitted a new idea shortly after reading through my reply.  See below for more info.)

Why can we not schedule for unpublication? If we can schedule a "Publish" surely it can't be that hard to add the reverse...

---

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for you on this question.  Like you, I am a fellow Canvas user.  (I work for an art college in Detroit.)  I don't have all the insights on why certain capabilities exist in Canvas and other do not.  I'd encourage you, however, to follow and/or monitor the Canvas Product Roadmap - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com) site so that you can see exactly what features and improvements Instructure has and will be working on.

And why do you keep referring people to request a feature? If that's still an upvoting system (which Instructure ignores), we are all just wasting our time.

---

Submitting your ideas in the Community is the proper procedure if you want it considered for implementation.  Now, submitting ideas here in the Community isn't the only way that Instructure gets feedback from us on what we would like to see implemented in Canvas.  They do gather feedback other ways, too.  Those other methods are described in more detail at What is the feature development process for Instru... - Instructure Community - 469504 (canvaslms.co....  After I suggested that Noah create a new idea, he did just that.  You can find his idea at [Pages] Make it so we can schedule a page for unpu... - Instructure Community - 587235 (canvaslms.co....  Currently, this idea hasn't been added to a larger theme, but hopefully it will be in the future.  His idea is currently still "New", and you can read more about the different statuses at How do Ideas and Themes work in the Instructure Co... - Instructure Community - 2980 (canvaslms.com).  There are two other Guides I'll direct you to, but those are more for when ideas are open for voting:

• How do I participate with themes? - Instructure Community - 552455 (canvaslms.com)
• How do I comment on ideas and themes? - Instructure Community - 567113 (canvaslms.com)

We may have to agree to disagree on your statement that Instructure ignores our requests.  I've been using Canvas since 2014/2015 and have been an active member of the Community since then.  I've submitted many ideas here in the Community, and I've had some of my own ideas (which I never thought would get implemented because they were so minor) now included in the core Canvas product.  But, there are some other ideas I've submitted which I'm still waiting on.  And, although it may not look like Instructure staff is responding directly to our threads, know that they do read our comments and they value our feedback.

I hope my responses here have helped to clarify how things work in the Community.

[NoahBoswell]

Yes, I was in fact the one who marked Chris's response as a solution, as it was a solution for my circumstance, but not everyone's.

I am still hoping they add this feature in the near future, as many educators would benefit from this.

I'm sorry for any confusion or frustration I caused @lglen2 .

[Chris_Hofer]

@NoahBoswell ...

Thanks for the reply, Noah...and thanks for confirming that my reply did help to answer your question.

[James · Accepted solution]

It used to be that you could not schedule pages to be published. This functionality was available with files, but not pages.

Community users made the feature request (probably more than once). Eventually Canvas added the ability to schedule the publishing of pages. They did not add the scheduling of unpublishing at the same time. I don't know where the feature came from. It might have been from an Instructure software engineer or it might have been a community contribution through GitHub. Canvas product managers did have to sign off on it, though. That means that they likely considered whether they wanted to add the ability to unpublish and they decided not to implement it. We are not privy to that discussion.

Scheduling the unpublishing may happen somewhere down the line. Canvas often rolls out changes in stages but normally those are on major changes so I wouldn't expect it here. There has been no movement on this since the initial rollout and it was potentially a small adjustment when they created it. They could have added a date to unpublish at the same time the added the ability to publish, but decided not to. It may be that the conditional release functionality they borrowed didn't allow for unpublishing and that it would take more effort to implement it.

Canvas like to keep the interface simple, so if there isn't a large demand for unpublishing pages, then it may not. Currently, pages are consistent with modules in that you can unlock them at a certain date but not lock them later. My guess is that they considered whether to allow for unpublishing of pages and decided against it, although they might have borrowed the functionality for modules to use with pages.

Sometimes the answer is that that Canvas does not do this. There may be work-arounds (I'll give three later in this message), but those may not work for everyone.

Feature requests are how Instructure finds out about and gauges the popularity of ideas. They do not actively monitor questions like this one to determine ideas. If you want them to start thinking about something, you need to put it into the ideas. @Chris_Hofer gave the correct answer to that. It was decided in the Community that anyone could mark an answer as correct -- not just the original poster -- and even if the post didn't answer the original question (someone else came along later and got an answer to their question).

Here are three work arounds that I thought of. Understand that they are just that, which means they may not work for your situation. Like with many things, it becomes a matter of whether the result it is worth the effort.

• Use files instead of pages. This allows you to schedule both sides of the file availability. This is what people used to have to do for pages before you could schedule them. This is a Canvas-native solution (other than preparing the document). There are some limitations to static documents that Canvas pages may not have.
• Set a reminder on your calendar to go through and hide the page at a certain time. When that reminder comes up, manually hide the page. You don't have to use a calendar, but hopefully you get the idea.
• Use a script to unpublish a page when a certain time is met. Then schedule that script to run every day. I would create two files -- the script itself and a text file that contains the URLs and dates they should be unpublished. That script would need to run on an machine that was powered on when the script is set to ran. This requires some technical skills (programming) although the script is not short and the logic is relatively straight forward.

[NoahBoswell]

Thanks, @James .

I will look into this.

However I still feel there may be some limitations on what we would be able to do with files compared to pages, and it may not totally work for my circumstance, as you mentioned above.

Thanks again.

[lglen2]

Jamses, I appreciate the time you took to answer this.

The thing I've found about feature requests is that features with thousands of votes are often left languishing as ideas, and features with dozens of votes are sometimes implemented, so it doesn't seem to follow any sort of logical pattern. Why have an up-voting system if you're not going to listen to what the users want?

The workarounds are welcome - thank you - but they won't work for me. I don't have access to our build, so I can't use scripts, and my IT is so paranoid (overly so, I think) that there's no way they'd let us run a script in any case.

Files won't work because it's not that kind of information that I want to change. I want to create two pages, one of which will be published at the start of term, and a replacement which will publish on a certain date - but that means the initial page is now redundant.

I suppose the one "workaround" (which is what I've had to do in any case) is the manual approach. It just seems bizarre to me that an automated system, especially one which has a "publish on" feature, does not allow this automation. It's as though they don't trust us with our own content. I hear you - you said that they likely actively made the decision not to include it - but I just don't see why, and the fact that "We are not privy to that discussion" is also troubling, in that while they'll do stuff to the interface without warning (sometimes mid-term), they NEVER seem to tell us why. Why that? Why now? Why not something else?

At any rate, I'm frustrated, and if it seems like I'm taking it out on you, I apologize. I'm just mad that I have to use a product that doesn't work the way it should, and Instructure doesn't seem to care what we think. I know they say they do, but I haven't seen evidence of that; they seem to like to promote features that don't do much (for me) other than add to the bloat, but have no problem ignoring the features we do request.

That's been my experience anyway.

Oh, and one more thing: reCAPTCHA?   Please stop with this!!! I'm writing a post response, not robbing a bank!! They made me do THREE of them in order to post this, and then the verification failed!

[James]

@lglen2 

I share the frustration with the idea system, I teach math where there is definitely a lot of room for improvement and there has been very little in the 12 years I've been using Canvas.

But I also understand how some of the development process works.

Some ideas aren't worth developing given return on investment. They try to target the middle 60% and those high end and low end users have to look for alternatives.

Solutions need to be generic, not tailored to one specific institution; they need to be accessible; they need to make sense. Now granted, none of that applies to this particular situation; but they are things to be considered.

They want to keep the interface simple and uncluttered and not add options for everything. That leads to reduced support since they don't have to explain complicated things. They want it to just work for most people. They don't always get that right.

They need to consider future development. I was invited to Instructure's HQ in 2017 to provide my feedback. I met with some product managers at the time and one thing that stuck with me was a lack of movement on discussions was because they were planning a major overhaul. They didn't want small fixes now to break what might be coming down the line.

Some ideas are just flat out bad and should not be developed. Many come because "my other LMS did this". Canvas has spent a lot of time researching what works and people forget that "I do this because my previous LMS forced me to" not because they would really want to do it left to their own advices. This is not to say that all items that come from another LMS are bad.

You often hear about the big ideas that are going to revolutionize things. We're developing AI so that you can write develop content faster hits the current buzz-words and sounds forward-thinking. Small, unglamorous things like "we added the ability to schedule when to unpublish a page" don't attract investors.

As for not sharing the notes from the product meetings that happen, I think that's typical for any business. Unless you work for the company and were in the meeting, you're not going to fully know what was said. Hopefully they are maintaining some kind of internal documentation system so that when it comes up again, they can look back and say "we discussed this and decided against it for these reasons." I'm the longest serving full-time faculty at my school and feel like there's going to be a lot of institutional knowledge lost if I ever retire. There seems to be a really high turnover at Instructor -- most of the names I see are not people I know. In some ways, that's good because you're not tied to previous ways of thinking about things -- you know, a fresh set of eyes.

There was an effort at one time to put some of that explanation into the Community, but it was always high-level results, not detailed minutes from a meeting. Even our board of trustee meeting (open to the public) minutes don't capture the full essence of what happened. Anyway, for a while, Canvas said "we're not going to do this ever" or "we're not going to do this right now."

Regarding the script approach, you don't need access to the Canvas build. As long as you can go to Account > Settings > New Access Token, you can access them. A small JavaScript or Python script could then be written. Some institutions may lock down their machines so you cannot install software on it. While I have access to a server at work, I use a home computer for some of the code that is specific to my classes (such as fetching viewing usage from Canvas Studio).

Canvas purposefully created the API so that people could extend and access Canvas. I feel that many times that a feature could have been added to Canvas, the deciding factor was that someone could use the API to do this, so they didn't develop it. Canvas is kind of inconsistent on that. There were times where they wouldn't point anyone to the solutions I had written; then there was a time when they said (maybe not publicly) that "James has already written this, so we don't need to address it." Most recently, they are tending to think of themselves as a platform that others can build from and extend.