Can admins set the Term Details (from the Terms menu)?

Question

Hello! Can admins set the Term Details (from the Terms menu) that would stick for the subsequent terms, without manual override?

In the Term Details page, I see the following:

Term Runs dates are set by our Registrar's office. Where can I, as institutional admin, set the rest of the dates for Students, Teachers, TAs, and Designers? Where can I edit them in such a way that the selections stick for subsequent terms? (Meaning, the categories "term start," "whenever," etc.)

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @IsraelV,

The default settings for a new term are basically what is shown on your screen and can't really be customized "for all future terms".  You could specify the correct dates as part of the term creation (likely in a SIS CSV file, but perhaps also done via API, I have no way to know how it wokrs at your institution).  The SIS CSV Format | Instructure Developer Documentation Portal documentation has more info on how you'd format the CSV file to specify the additional dates.

If you can't change the current automation, this would likely become a manual task you'd need to perform every X days/weeks/months…. This is actually how we do things at my institution, because of the complexity with defining the dates we want to have programmatically, and only having 3 terms per year.

I hope this info helps!

-Chris

melodyc_lam · Accepted Answer

To add to @Chris's answer, if you use the SIS CSV file you can mark items as "Process as UI changes" which means any other subsequent SIS imports will not change the date.

You can do this through API, but depending on how many terms you have, the SIS CSV file might be easier to work with and process.

Just to give you insight how I do this (unlike his institution, at my K12 district we have over 400 "terms" since we have them split by school and we have every single combination you can think of with quarters, semesters, yearlong + calendar differences between schools):

* Go to the root account → Settings → Reports → run the SIS export report for Terms
* Edit that file for the term overrides that you will need (you'll need to duplicate term lines and add a column for each of the overrides you want, which is somewhat tedious unfortunately)
* Save and upload that file in the SIS import system, remembering to check "Override UI changes" and "Process as UI Changes" before uploading.

Hope this helps!

melodyc_lam · Accepted Answer

To add to @Chris's answer, if you use the SIS CSV file you can mark items as "Process as UI changes" which means any other subsequent SIS imports will not change the date.

You can do this through API, but depending on how many terms you have, the SIS CSV file might be easier to work with and process.

Just to give you insight how I do this (unlike his institution, at my K12 district we have over 400 "terms" since we have them split by school and we have every single combination you can think of with quarters, semesters, yearlong + calendar differences between schools):

* Go to the root account → Settings → Reports → run the SIS export report for Terms
* Edit that file for the term overrides that you will need (you'll need to duplicate term lines and add a column for each of the overrides you want, which is somewhat tedious unfortunately)
* Save and upload that file in the SIS import system, remembering to check "Override UI changes" and "Process as UI Changes" before uploading.

Hope this helps!