I discovered that when I schedule a file for student accessibility at a later date, that file posting immediately becomes visible to the student. They see the title of the item but when they click it a message pops up telling the student it's not available and gives the date when it will become available. In other words, if I want to front-load a bunch of items and set timers on each one, my students are going to see a long list of irrelevant dead links until they come alive at the scheduled time. At the risk of being dubbed a relentless critic, this is a really, really dumb system! If I don't want my students to see an item until next week, or the week after, or whenever, most likely I also prefer not to let them know it's coming! As I see it, the only way to avoid this is to manually publish each item in real time exactly when I want it available and not a moment sooner. So much for advance planning! Unless this feature is changed I am all but forced to abandon the schedule option.

So my question is obvious: If an item is not yet meant to be accessible, why is it automatically made visible to the student as a link to nowhere? Is there a way to force Canvas to NOT display scheduled items prior to the pre-set publish date? Why doesn't "scheduled but not yet published" produce the exact same student view as "unpublished," namely keeping the item fully hidden from view?