[Assignments] Bulk Due Date Changer Publish Option

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(11)

In some instances, Instructors copy a course over to a new course shell for an upcoming semester and would like to have the option to publish or hide certain content from the assignment due date changer area.

It would be a simple check box or radio button indicating if you would want to publish or not.

8 Comments
KristinL
Community Team
Community Team
Status changed to: Open
 
SusanNiemeyer
Community Contributor

While I suppose the Canvas could add the "publish/ unpublish" option to the Bulk Assignment Due Date changer, it would still be DEATH BY A THOUSAND CLICKS! 

A much better solution would be for "imported content" to come over as "unpublished" by default.

Code-with-Ski
Community Participant

@SusanNiemeyer 

To build on your suggestion, rather than having it default to "unpublished", it would be even better if there was an option when importing content to set the published state with something like the following options:

  • Use same published state
  • Publish all content
  • Unpublish all content

As for this idea specifically, if they add this feature, it would be good if it includes a check all/uncheck all option for the published setting so that you can avoid having to click on every single one

SusanNiemeyer
Community Contributor

@Code-with-Ski 

That's a great idea! I hope that the Canvas Development Team considers it.

Right now, it's fairly easy to publish a lot of items at once if they are arranged in modules. I have weekly modules, so each week I publish a new module. Every item in that module is published at once.

For the Canvas Development Team - I'm looking for any way to accomplish the opposite. I want to "unpublish" a great deal of imported content at once. 

Code-with-Ski
Community Participant

@SusanNiemeyer 

Using the modules to help publish sounds like a good partial workaround.  Does it work to unpublish them all too if you unpublish a module?

SusanNiemeyer
Community Contributor

@Code-with-Ski  Alas, unpublishing the module doesn't automatically unpublish the individual items in the module.

 

James
Community Champion

Unpublishing individual module items when you unpublish a module isn't a good workflow. I may have the same item in multiple modules (this semester, my stats class does that for almost every module item as I'm using the modules to determine award badges at different levels).

I have looked at what goes on behind the scenes. When you publish a module, it automatically publishes every item in the module. That's not something the web-interface does, it's built into the API call. That makes it difficult to work around.

If you wanted to modify the behavior of the publish module button, you could read the existing state (published, unpublished) of every module, call the API to publish the module, and then go back through each item that was unpublished previously and unpublish it again, but publishing just the module without the module items isn't supported.

You could create a fake module underneath the real module. Put all of your unpublished module items in it and never publish it. Publish the real module with the items that need published. Then, as you need the other items, you can drag them to the real module from the fake one and publish them. This is, of course, very hacky and lots of clicking.

I can conjecture a reason for the way that it is. Canvas wants to make life easy on the majority of the users and the typical workflow is to add the items to the module and then publish once it's ready. Force-publishing the module items makes sure that instructor's don't forget to publish assignments. Theoretically, most people would want the items published in a published module. Ideally, the course would be ready to go before students ever get into it.

Like many people, I don't live in an ideal world. My courses are more dynamic and I would rather not publish a bunch of assignments knowing that I'm going to have to change the dates on them later (meaning students get notifications of the changes).  My local Canvas admin tells me that it's better for students to see that there is an assignment even if the details or instructions aren't supplied. That way they get a sense of how much work is involved in the course.

I do have a edge, though. I use the Adjust All Due Dates Google spreadsheet that I wrote before Canvas had their own solution. It has the ability to publish or unpublish any assignment by setting a field to 1 (published) or 0 (unpublished). It then writes changes in bulk. It still has a lot of things that could be improved, like differentiated assignments, but there are some things it still does well. I had about 124 assignments in my stats class this term and I was able to use the spreadsheet to go through and add week numbers and weekdays to help organize my weekly homepages. I then color coded the weeks and it made for a nice three page printout of what I had planned.

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.