User course settings

Cfurr1

Course Settings greyed out for term, start and end dates--district admin of technology cannot seem to solve the issue. It has been going on for 2 years now. In addition, I can't unpublish old courses and they remain on students' dashboards. Getting message that since there are graded assignments, that it cannot be unpublished. 

Chris

Hi @Cfurr1,

There are probably a couple related things going on here...

First, the course dates being greyed out is probably a result of your administrator enabling the "Don't let teachers modify course availability dates" setting when that setting became available back in 2021 ( Canvas Release Notes (2021-03-20) - Instructure Community ).  That setting is one checkbox that applies to all courses at your school/district/institution, and I'd guess someone made the decision that they wanted all of the courses to go by some sort of official term dates (that's how we have our Canvas configured as well).  The admin should be able to change the dates in the course for you if there's a need and they agree to it.

Second, courses *should* move off of the student dashboards once the course ends (controlled by the dates above).  So I guess my question is what dates your school is actually using for the courses...  Students can always unfavorite courses if they would like them to get removed form the dashboard, but if the dates are entered as part of a term, manual work shouldn't be needed.  I wonder if perhaps the dates are set somewhat liberally to let students do late or make-up work or something?  At my institution, courses become read-only for students on the day that final grade submissions are due to our Registrar's Office, so students don't need to do anything special to get the courses removed from the dashboard in a timely manner (in face, some say it's *too* timely and would rather have the courses stay on the dashboard longer).

I'm not sure that there is any one "correct" way to handle dates, which is why Canvas has a lot of options for administrators to pick and choose form in this area.  What works for us may not work for your school at all and vice versa.  Hopefully this information helps.  if your administrator does want to change something and can't figure out how, they can always make a post on here or contact Canvas support on their own and get some assistance.

-Chris