[Direct Share] Remove Dates on Copy To

[ehills]

The Direct Share feature, specifically the "Copy To" feature has been great! I have a couple little requests to tweak it. It doesn't include the ability to remove dates like the "Import Course Content" process does. When teachers create a late policy in the gradebook and they copy over assignments using "Copy To," it automatically applies the late policy if the due date occurred in the past. Or if they are copying from a previous grading period, they cannot edit the due date. Giving the teachers the ability to remove dates during the direct share process would be very helpful.

Something like this might do the trick!

Additionally, it would be great if items came over as unpublished by default. But let's not get greedy 🙂

[DeletedUser]

Voting this up!  Yes please!

[kosmunds1]

This would be really helpful and keep the gradebook clean!

[audra_agnelly]

Up vote! I just ran into this with a teacher today. They've been using 'copy to' to copy assignments from an old course to a current course and students are receiving 0's right away because of the missing policy in the gradebook. Since Canvas now auto-removes the missing flag when a grade is entered (even a 0), we've encouraged teachers to use a missing policy to set work as missing. So our work around just causes problems in a different work flow.

[llomax]

I would like to take this idea one step further. When using the copy to or the importing feature all items should default to having the due date REMOVED. The option to keep due dates should be the selection made if necessary. The check mark box to remove due dates is 95% of the time overlooked by teachers and this causes more problems than I can count. Teachers import items continuously from past courses, and when the gradebook settings in their current courses are set to apply the 0 to missing assignments, this causes havoc in their gradebooks that is not easily fixed. (short of deleting everything, duplicating assignments or manually removing the 0's one by one! Please, Please, Please make the default be to remove all due dates when importing or copying to. (Any assignments that come in without due dates are easily fixed with this option and 99.9% of the time teachers are changing these due dates anyways).

[Hildi_Pardo]

Problem statement:

Recently a teacher wrote me: " I want assignments to default to a zero after the due date. Right now it puts in zeros for every assignment not submitted, even before the due date. Help!"

I couldn't figure out why this was happening, Canvas Support came to the rescue; they said: "I checked "X" assignment in this course and I can see the students received the auto 0s on Oct 27, 2024 at 12:57pm. Usually students receive auto 0s if the assignment is published with a due date in the past. This happens when an assignment is being copied to a course and the due date is not changed before publishing it, so the system takes the original due date (which was in the original course), as the students did not submit until that date and time it gave them the 0. I'd suggest the teacher to change the due date of an assignment before publishing it."

So then I asked if there was a way to fix it now. He replied: "To fix this please go to Grades and hit the 3 dots button next to each assignment's name and select 'Set default grade' and enter - (hyphen) and make sure to check 'Overwrite already-entered grades'. With this the system will remove all the grades from that assignment."

So this Idea is being submitted to request that when someone does a Direct Share and Copies content to another course, to have the Ability to either Unpublish the assignment, AND/OR have the ability to Remove/Update Dates during the process, OR give a warning to the person to go and Unpublish and updates the dates in the new course.

Proposed solution:

When someone does a Direct Share and Copies content to another course, please add the Ability to either Unpublish the assignment upon import, AND/OR have the ability to Remove/Update Dates during the process, OR give a warning to the person to go and Unpublish and updates the dates in the new course. This will help unknowing teachers to avoid issues created by these incorrect/old dates.

User role(s):

admin,instructor