Course Participation & Term Access Settings - Has the Relationship Between These Changed?

This is a disaster for us. We have a tool that allows faculty to temporarily "unlock" courses from prior terms for a variety of reasons. This change breaks that change and many of our standard processes that have been in place since 2014.

@pray4 This is happening for us as well. I tested as a student user, and the student is able to submit an assignment still, but the Teacher cannot edit anything or make anything new.

MeazellOU

Keep us posted!

I was told that:

The student access is limited by the course start and end dates if the course participation is set to 'Course', mean while the teacher access is limit by the term dates in every occasion, as far as I can see. This has been confirmed by one of higher level support agents regarding the other case number you sent us, within an internal conversation as well as within our guide that you can see here .

That makes no sense at all. That means that a student can turn in work that the instructor then cannot grade. I am pushing back on this. If this is working "as designed", then this is the perfect instance to use the new UX Bug process.

@james_whalley , are they saying it's been wrong for 14 years and they finally fixed it. Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Chris

I have been getting a lot of pushback from Canvas support about this too. I found the GitHub commit for the change at Fix teacher access with course dates in closed term · instructure/canvas-lms@d74f0eb, so we can at least prove this was just changed (without actually being in release/deploy notes).

It seems to me like the guides have said one thing and Canvas had actually worked in a different way for 12+ years (including a UI change or two in course settings). Instead of updating the documentation to match the reality of Canvas that many of us have been utilizing, it seems like someone made the decision to change the way Canvas woks to match the documentation. I personally think they should have done the opposite and just changed the documentation to how Canvas has actually worked. The example you gave is one I actually mentioned to support, but they just continually have been falling back to "that's what our guides say".

I have alerted our CSM to this change in hopes he may be able to engage with product leadership to review the change and get it reverted. I'd encourage everyone who has been affected negatively by this change to file a support ticket and loop in your CSMs (if you're an admin).

-Chris

Chris

Unfortunately, that seems to be the response I'm getting right now. I'm hoping our CSM can help get this straightened out, as I think Canvas Support is struggling because the system and documentation do actually match right now.

-Chris

@Chris And the guides all just got transferred to the new community, so using the Wayback Machine can't show us what the documentation said historically.

Our CSM seems to be supportive of our position. Since when is end user documentation the authority on how an application should behaves. It's normally the reverse. Documentation reflects application behavior—it does not dictate. What possible rationale is there for giving students and observers write access without also giving instructors access?

Take anything support says with a huge grain of salt.

This is completely unacceptable and it is a hill I will die on.

We use the same feature. Now we will have to be inundated with requests from instructors to open up their courses again, since this feature will no longer work.

Our CSM says the change will be reverted and the documentation updated to bring it in line with the long established behavior of this feature. ETA TBD.

Thanks for the happy news, @leward.

pray4

Support informed me late last night this has already been corrected in PROD — waiting to get out of morning meetings to test, but hopefully, this is resolved.

@pray4 They told me this as well, but my testing just now proves otherwise.

I was also told by support that no change had been made to begin with and that it has always been the case that the participation dates associated with Term dates are not overridden by Course dates.