[Courses] Delay applying Missing Policy until after course is published

[Tasha_Biesinger]

Problem statement:

When an instructor has set a missing policy in a course and imports that course into a second course site without adjusting dates during the import process, all students are immediately awarded scores (generally zero) for any online submission assignments with a due date. Since these are now 'graded' assignments, as soon as the instructor publishes the course these students will see Current Grade values of zero, and F letter grade if grading scheme applied. Changing the due date of the assignment after the import does not remove the zeros applied because of the missing policy. Instructors cannot unpublish assignments prior to importing either since there are student submissions in the prior course. Using the "adjust due dates" functionality is often difficult for faculty to use and also changes the Participation value from "Term" to "Course" which creates its own set of challenges and issues.

Proposed solution:

Do not apply the Missing Policy to the gradebook until the course is published. This gives faculty a window of time after importing to adjust the due dates on assignments before scores are automatically applied to assignments that students don't even have access to yet.

User role(s):

instructor

[SusanNiemeyer]

The most important thing that you can tell your instructors is that they should "remove" the dates when importing content into a new course. Otherwise, it's just a huge headache.

Actually, I would take this Idea Conversation one step further and suggest that whenever an instructor imports content from a closed course to a new one, they should be automatically be prompted to either "remove" the dates or "shift" the dates.  The problem is that instructors need to know that they must check the box for "adjusting the dates." 

[Jeff_F]

Yes, everyone doesn't set up their course ahead of term start.

A work around is to create a course copy of the elements into a temporary sandbox course, unpublish the assignments (and perhaps also change the date), and then copy those into the new live course. That is a hop, skip and jump. ;o)

[Tasha_Biesinger]

@SusanNiemeyer: "removing dates" is a great workaround! I like your idea addition of requiring a selection of one or the other from a CLOSED course.

I have seen faculty struggle with the "shift dates" functionality. I would love to see that improved as well e.g., fuse the 'shift dates' functionality with the 'bulk due date update' functionality. Maybe I'll put in another feature idea for that bit 😊

@Jeff_F: yes, that is another great workaround that has other benefits like fixing/updating things that didn't work in the current term. They generally can't/don't want to fix these things in the current course for good reasons, but they forget about them by the time they teach the course again. Having the template site lets them make the change right away for the next term.

[Tasha_Biesinger]

This change is still needed. We saw more faculty get caught by this 'feature' this term more than previously - possibly because more faculty have been finding/using the Missing Policy. Also, I forgot I created this idea and created a second copy of this idea because of the larger wave of this issue this term: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Ideas/Gradebook-Prevent-Missing-Policy-from-applying-zeros...