Extend Course for Individual Student

[jason_hill]

As an administrator, I would like the ability to extend a course past the course conclude date for an individual student, so that the student can make up the work for an Incomplete Grade. For example, at our institution, an Incomplete Grade may be issued to a student under extenuating circumstances (i.e. severe injury, death in the family, etc.). A student who receives an Incomplete Grade is expected to make up the course work within a few weeks of the actual course end date. As it is now, extending the course end date extends it for every member of the course, which can cause confusion for students who have successfully completed all of the objectives for the course. Enabling an administrator to selectively extend a course for a specific student would assist faculty in managing coursework for students who undergo difficult times during the regular period of instruction.

🔎 This idea has been archived. While this idea isn't open for comments, it is an important part of Instructure’s idea conversations and development process. Contributions like this are valuable as Instructure prioritizes work on new or existing features.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

We'd be interested in a better course conclude workflow too.  It's almost been a year and no group is formed.  What are the chances of this idea moving forward?

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[jason_hill]

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Thanks snugent​ for the idea of creating a new section.  I tested this in the test environment, and it was easy to create a new "Incomplete" section with a later ending date, then go to People and add the student into the section.  Didn't even need to remove her from the original section.  Students in the original section no longer see the course after the end date, but the student who is in both sections can see the course.

Only admins can do it, but there are not that many incompletes and we have enough admins that it's not a burden.

Still it would be MUCH better to have "change course dates" in the editing gear for each student in People.

[michellemeazell]

So it's on the radar... let's hope it gets deployed at some point!

[lvitanza]

My colleague is working on a solution to make this possible.  I have directed him to the link for this forum.  I think many of you will find it useful.

[datsupport]

We create a section within the course and add the student(s) and faculty member to the section.  We do not have too many of these so the Administrators can create them.  Having the Admins have control over this ensures that the faculty member notifies the Registrar's office of an incomplete.

[82711010bc61080]

 @scottdennis ‌ or anyone, by chance is there any update on this topic?  Last post from Instructure from Allison Weiss stating: "After talking this over as a product team, we've decided to make researching course conclude workflows a priority during the next six months. It doesn't mean that we'll be able to resource it this year, but it does mean that we're committing to having a solid plan in place that we can begin to prioritize one phase at a time. "

We are in need of this option and seeing the manual work around sounds like a lot of extra work to be done.  Thank you for any update you can give on this.

[cms_hickss]

We've been handling this issue since we moved to Canvas very close to how snugent‌ described it. We create a new section with new start and stop dates. And open the course date, but leave the section with the rest of the students alone.

But for instances, during our interesting hurricane season this past year it would have been nice not to have to move students around into new sections if we could have just changed their access date for the course/section.

Even if the option of extending end dates for a student does not appear until after the course section's end dates have passed it would still be better and less steps/clicks.

[ChrisMedina]

a little late to the topic but I just saw this now.

This is what I have instructors do that give extensions to students. Notice I say have them do it.  

create a new sections in the course, name it something like extension etc. add the dates and make sure they check the box option. then in people select the student that they want extended then add them to that section. 

then the student then has access to the course and can turn in assignments. 

The only thing is that some instructors use the Until date in their assignments. in that case they would need to go to each one and add the extension section and adjust the dates for just that section or just remove the until date. that would allow the student to turn in the assignment and just marks it late. 

it would be nice to have a one button solution that adjusts all this easily but this method seems to work pretty well and since the instructors have to do this process it pushes them to encourage the students to get the course finished on time. 

[Renee_Carney]

The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Hi helpdesk we don't allow teachers the ability to create or edit sections, so the admin must do it.  There are not a huge number of incompletes but it does add to the workload.  And we must also extend the course end date to allow students to take quizzes, due to the way we use term, course and section dates.  Also don't forget to add the teacher to the new incomplete section!

One other problem just came to my attention, when teachers import content from a course with an extended end date, the dates don't adjust correctly to the new semester.  Guess we could tell the teacher to edit the course end date temporarily and change it back after the import, but you can see this whole process gets problematical.

Incompletes are a fact of life at the college level and there should be a more efficient way to do this.

[ChrisMedina]

you don't need to add the teacher to the new incomplete section because of the term settings for faculty. My faculty have a longer access than students. Extending the course instead of adding a new section allows all students to have access to the course and you will end up with student who say that since they had access the late assignments should be counted in their grade. Having faculty create a new section helps with them keeping track of those with an extension contract. 

seems our differences in how we handle an incomplete shows there is a need for Canvas to come up with a solution and means this needs to be worked on.  

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Hi Chris,

So many variables in Canvas for end of semester! Our courses become read only after the section end date for teachers (and invisible to students), course concludes, so I believe if their section is closed they won't be able to make changes to the class unless they are in the extended section. They can view everything and import content to new semester shells but not edit. We do freeze taking quizzes after the course end date so that has to be extended for the incomplete. After the section end which is a couple of weeks after course ends, all the other students won't be in the class.

This is difficult since some instructors don't put lock dates into quizzes, so extending the course end date might allow someone to take a late final before the section closes. I have to check with each Instructor and alert them about changing the course end date.

[yumia_hobbs]

This is definitely needed! At our institution, we get a lot of requests from teachers to add other teachers to their old courses, chairs requesting to be added to old courses, etc. Sure, when you have to go through the date/term changing process every now and then, it's no problem. When you're fulfilling numerous requests like these on a daily basis, it becomes a real pain to have to go through this process.

[tim_kato]

At UBC students can get "standing deferred" standing in a course along with a deadline to complete outstanding coursework, if approved by appropriate academic advisors in their home faculty. This feature would align well with this business process, especially if we could automate and set up via the API. We currently have a workaround of cloning the course.

Ideal additional requirement: the instructor(s) and/or assigned grader(s) should be able to modify the grade for the extended student(s) and only the extended student(s), the rest of the course should not be editable as the work the remainder of the class did should not be modified.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Hi  @tim_kato ‌ - that's a nice idea about only being able to modify grades for the extended student.  However teachers do have to edit assignments if there are "assign to" availability dates that would prevent the student from submitting.  So they would have to be able to edit parts of the course, and I don't think it would be easy to allow limited editing.

When you clone the course, what about the student's work in the original course?  Are you able to transfer that?

[tim_kato]

Hi  @Nancy_Webb_CCSF ‌ - good point. When we clone the course, we sometimes need to extract information for the student such as submissions or discussion posts.

Further to this, when work is completed at a later date, alternatives often need to be provided - group projects or group activities are not realistic, for example. Also, in many cases, all that's needed is course notes and a final exam, since most students defer completion of the final exam while having already completed the remainder of the coursework.

I can respect that it would be challenging to design this proposed feature in a way that would meet everyone's needs, due to complex requirements.

[KristinL]

Our Product Team reviewed some of our oldest feature proposals recently, and this thread was identified as one that they would not be able to include in their current or future plans. While we appreciate your proposal, we also want to be transparent about the likelihood of something like this making it to production.

Thank you for collaborating, and we hope that you submit another idea in the future!