Limited functionality with Course Pacing enabled

[ericlee-]

Hello!

Our team has done some testing on Course Pacing, and we had a couple comments:

• Are there any plans to add functionality to manage availability dates with Course Pacing? Or due times rather than only due dates?

• We noticed that only assignments that have been added to Modules can be managed using Course Pacing. Are there plans to account for assignments that haven’t been added to Modules? If an assignment hasn’t been added to Modules, the due/availability dates cannot be edited with Course Pacing enabled.

[dlyons]

@ericlee-, I'd love to learn more about your needs around those two cases.

1. How do you use availability dates in rolling/open enrollment courses?
2. How are you designing your rolling/open enrollment courses where some assignments are not linking in the Modules?

I'm happy to have a call so you can screenshare and we can discuss more freely if that is easier for you too. 🙂

[ericlee-]

Hi @dlyons, thank you for your response. 

1. The use case that my team had in mind was for rolling enrolment courses where students must complete the course within a specified timeframe. For example, a Canvas Catalog course where a student has X amount of days to complete the course. Due dates are a softer deadline compared to availability dates.

2. While I agree that most rolling enrolment courses would typically use modules to organize the course content, the UI does not indicate that you must add the assignment to a module, or warn the user that an assignment hasn’t been added to a module. Assignments can still be created, edited and accessed from the ‘Assignments’ tab.

[dlyons]

@ericlee-, thanks for explaining. For #1 it sounds like that will happen automatically once Course Pacing supports section paces. When a student is enrolled in Catalog into a section with a fixed end date we'll automatically assign due dates based on that section. If you create another listing with a different amount of time to complete, students in that section will get appropriate due dates. etc. #2 is an interesting point! I'll reflect on that with the team.