Preventing the "Adjust event and due date option" from overriding term dates

[spipitone]

Canvas now provides an administrative switch that will prevent teachers from modifying course availability dates. However, even when this switch is selected, instructors using the “Adjust events and due dates” option when importing course content can override the term dates. To make it worse, if the “Do not allow teachers to modify course availability dates” is turned on, the instructors are not able to change from incorrect course dates to the term dates. I would like to suggest that Canvas allows instructors to adjust course dates, but after the adjustment is made, the term dates would be automatically selected instead of the course dates. The colleges could then use or not use the switch that prevents the instructor from changing the course dates.

[spipitone]

Status changed to moderating? I am not sure what needs clarification. Please explain. Canvas support understood the problem and recommended I post it here.

Thanks,

Steve

[spipitone]

Hi Stefanie,

Are instructors able to vote for this idea? If so how do they go about doing so?

Thanks,

Steve

[Stef_retired]

@spipitone  Anyone who is authenticated into the community can rate and comment on an idea conversation. How do idea conversations work in the Canvas Community? provides detailed information.

Idea conversations aren't associated with a voting or ranking system. We place the greatest value on comments from educators that support and amplify the problem statement. 

Thanks for asking!

[chriscas]

This issue has dogged us for years (even before the Canvas switch to prevent modification to dates, we had javascript in place).  I really really really want Canvas to address this ASAP!  Now that there is a built-in switch, the import process should check that and not modify course dates when it's set (changing assignment dates makes sense, but there is NO reason for our use case for the actual course dates to be changed.  We want our courses to be controlled by the term dates.

-Chris

[spipitone]

Hi Chris,

Would you be able to share the script your college uses to prevent the overriding of term dates?

Thanks,

Steve Pipitone

[chriscas]

@spipitone,

With the addition of the built-in switch (and the changes made to the date UI), we no longer use custom code to prevent faculty form changing this.  You can find my old code at https://github.com/cmcasey79/canvas-scripts-by-chris though if you wish to take a look at how it used to work.  The addition of the course/term dropdown selection broke the JS, and I never found an easy fix for it because of the way Canvas implements things dynamically after page loads now.

-Chris

[spipitone]

Thanks Chris. When instructors use the "adjust event and date feature", doesn't it override your term date even when the switch is on?

Steve

[chriscas]

@Hi @spipitone ,

Yes, even with the switch, we have still had instances where imports overrode the course dates.  We've not been able to solve that issue through javascript, rather I have a python script that I run once a day which goes through every course and checks if the course dates have overrides (and it can fix them too if I want it to).  If you're interested, I could try to make a sharable version of that code.  It does quite a few other things in addition to checking course dates, so it may not be the best thing to share in its current form.  Let me know if you are, indeed, interested.

-Chris

[spipitone]

Hi Chris,

Thank you for the offer, but I think the code would be more than I want.

Steve

[ProductPanda]

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