As most of us have learned, Canvas can be a difficult platform to master. It has so many bells and whistles and can perform so many functions that even experienced users can find themselves getting tripped up on certain details.
Few things are more frustrating than building an assignment in Canvas and not getting your settings right on the first try. So many little issues can crop up if we don't turn on or turn off the correct features.
So how do Due Dates and Available Dates differ and why do they matter?
In addition to setting a due date for an assignment, instructors can specify a specific date range when students can submit the assignment. These dates are called availability dates. These dates are optional and can be set depending on how you want to manage the assignment.
Why Due Dates?
-Setting Assignment Due Dates is required to get your assignments to display in your gradebook.
*If you can't see an assignment populate in your grade book, it probably means you didn't give it a due date.
-Canvas will display the time zone date and time according to context. If you manage courses in a time zone other than your local time zone and create or edit a due date for an assignment, the course and local times will be displayed for reference, that way, it's always relative to the students' schedules.
-When Multiple Grading Periods are enabled in a course, only due dates are validated against closed grading periods. Availability dates do not apply.
-You can also set a specific time as part of the due date. When you change a due time on an assignment, the seconds value defaults to 0.. unless the minutes value is set to 59, in which case, the seconds are also set to 59.
-Student assignments submitted after the due date will be marked as late in the Gradebook and a counter will indicate how late.
For example: if you set a due date of November 4 at 11:59 pm, any student submission made at or after November 4 at 11:59 pm is marked late.
Why Available Dates?
-If you want to create a date range for students to view and submit an assignment, you can set availability dates. Availability dates can also be called lock dates.
-Available From: the date and time when the Assignments will become available to students. If a due date does not include a time, the listed date defaults to the course's default due time. Students cannot view assignment content until after the Available from date has passed.
-Until: the date and time when students can no longer submit the assignment. If no time is set, this time defaults to 11:59 pm for the course time zone and the assignment will close at 12:00:00 am of the following day. At this point, the assignment is no longer accessible to students, including absent students, unless you "re-open" it.
*When the assignment is published, leaving a blank availability date field allows the assignment to be submitted at any time throughout the entire course. This is the preferred setting for most PLI assigned work.
-There are a few circumstances where Available Dates and Until Dates might be needed.
-When assigning Tests or Quizzes that you don't want students to have access to until a certain point in the day, availability comes into play. Some teachers will set an Available time to after the first 5 minutes of class and then set it to close at the end of class.
*Please be sure to be mindful of IEP requirements for students (SPED, 504, and Dyslexia classifications) to have extra time on their tests and other potential requirements for accommodation.
-If your task is built In Quizzes, like when administering an assessment, the Until date does not restrict student access to view the result of their quiz. For instance, you may not want students to view the results of their quiz after the Until date. To make this change, you need to edit the quiz options and restrict the quiz results.