Good morning,
As we enter the tail end of the semester, there may be instances where you need to extend or change due dates for students on certain assignments, or to provide make-up or bonus assignments to individuals versus the whole class. Luckily, there’s an easy way to create differentiated due dates in Canvas!
To start, go the assignment details page of an assignment, which you can find by clicking on the name on the Assignments page, then clicking the “Edit” button:
At the bottom of the details page, you’ll find a due date box which includes the due date, the open date (“Available from”), and the close date (“Until”). Note that the due date and the close date are different things! If you want students to submit by a certain date but still have wiggle room for late submissions, make sure your close date is later than the due date (or left blank). Otherwise, you’ll want to make both the same.
By default, you’ll see that assignments are assigned to “Everyone.” If you just change this to the student’s name who needs a new due date, you’ll lose all the grades for the other students on the Grades page—eek!
Instead, you’ll want to look beneath the due date box for the “+Add” button. Click this button, which will create a new due date box. Here is where you’ll fill in the student’s name, as well as their individual due date:
You can create as many differentiated due dates as needed, or assign several students to the new due date. When you do things right, you’ll be able to scroll up to the original due date box and see that it’s now assigned to “Everyone Else”:
But what if you didn’t do these steps, and now all your students’ grades are gone? No worries! You can fix that issue by going to the assignment, adding a new due date box, and assigning it to “Everyone Else.” This should recover your grades as it syncs back up.
If you have an assignment that’s only for one or a few students, you can override the default (“Everyone”) on the assignment details page and just assign it to the necessary folks. In this case, the lack of other students’ grades is a feature, not a bug.
One thing that can be helpful for make-up work is to give a student an excused grade for the original assignment, then offer up the make-up assignment. To excuse a student, type “EX” for their grade on the Grades page. This will make it not calculate into the final grade.
Be on the lookout for the penultimate issue of the Fall 2023 newsletter next week, and please take the survey here if you’d like to help shape what happens in Spring 2024!
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