Shift dates best practice for open/start and end/close dates

[venitk]

When you ask Canvas to automatically shift the dates, what are the best practices for which dates you choose? 

I'll explain:

Our courses open to students a week before the course starts and any assignments are due. 

During this week, instructors do have a welcome announcement posted that most like to copy over.

The courses also remain open to students a month after the end date. No announcements or assignments are posted or made after the end date.

So, when I'm setting the dates to shift, do I go with the window during which a course might have announcements and assignments? or do I go with the open and close date for both courses?

For example, a course in fall had the following dates:

• Open: 10/21
• Start: 10/28
• End: 12/13
• Close: 1/13

Spring has the following dates:

• Open: 3/23
• Start: 3/30
• End: 5/15
• Close: 6/15

So, what do I put in this box?

I'm asking because I thought we had figured it out, but this term, many of the courses didn't have their dates shifted smoothly. My courses had the first two weeks of assignments bunched up in the first spring week, and they didn't reach all the way to the end date. So I'm wondering if we're not doing it the best way.

[ahenschel]

I just had to redo an import a few times to get this better, but it is still not perfect. 

1.) I changed the start and end dates to match exactly with the dates and times my class was going to meet face-to-face as I knew there weren't any due dates before or after the first and last face-to-face meetings, respectively.  More dates were not correct if I included the extra week at the beginning after the course gets published.

2.) I also included two weekday substitutions (Thursday-to-Friday, for example).  If I didn't include these, sometimes Canvas moved the due day one week ahead of the correct week.

The holiday break differences in spring versus fall semester caused more manual updating after the import, but at least things were spaced somewhat correctly.

I like using the 'Course Due Date' spreadsheet, but all 'pages' with set 'to do' dates don't update in the Course Due Date spreadsheet so I am going to avoid including pages with 'to do' dates in new course/module designs.