This content was published: April 23, 2018. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Meet the updated Manage Dates tool
Posted by Andy Freed
The Manage Dates tool should be a feature that makes you happy. You should be able to update all your course activity dates in one place. For a while, it let you do some of those updates, but other tool-specific features like Due Dates weren’t visible to change. Fortunately, with the March and April Continuous Delivery updates, the Manage Dates tool is getting some vast improvements.
Now you can edit Due Dates and see other features like if a discussion has a lock date, if the activity is visible, if it is in the calendar and more. It may seem overwhelming at first. Here’s a screenshot of what will be visible with the April Continuous Delivery update coming this Friday (4/27/18).
Filter Options
One overlooked function is the filtering tool. It let’s you pick specific course activities to view, which is useful for seeing all the Discussion topics & settings, for example. Filtering becomes even more useful with the updated Manage Dates tool because it reduces the amount of items you see so you can have fairly granular control over what you’re updating.
The filter function lets you select individual tools to update. If you really want to get into the weeds, click on the Show Advanced Filtering Options.
One small suggestion
I probably should have led with this. It helps avoid problems with date issues later on. When you are setting dates for Content, try just setting dates on the module itself, not on every content item in the module. This helps simplify management of the dates, and based on the volume of calls we receive about it, setting dates on individual content items tends to create access issues for students later. It also makes managing dates easier in the future if you’re only changing the dates at the module level instead of individual files.
In Manage Dates, you can filter by tool and select Content, then sort the results by Type to see just the modules. Then you can manage the dates for the modules rather easily.
One even smaller suggestion
If you make the dates available in the Calendar, students will be able to see the dates in the Pulse mobile app or in their own calendar if they sync with their Google Calendar.
About Andy Freed
I'm the Director of Learning Technology & Innovation (LTI!), where I oversee our infrastructure, technical support, and online student services teams. I've been with the College since 2001 and have worked in several positions, from tech... more »
HALLELUJAH!!!!!
I guess my tweet-shaming of D2L finally worked!
Great news…have been waiting for a tool to ensure that ALL dates can be checked. Would love a simple video tutorial on term to term date changes. Currently I do the number of days to forward all dates but as you know all dates don’t change so I have to go the the problem children date fields and edit. Hopefully this update will fix this and a nice simple “how to” narrated video will not only benefit me but many others.
Believe it or not, you weren’t the only person asking for these improvements. I’m sure your comments helped though. :)
Kevin, I’ll ask if one our Instructional Technology Specialists can do this, though we might wait until we see the release notes for May in case there are even more improvements.
Here is what should be included in the May release (last Friday in May) for additional updates to the Manage Dates tool. It looks like the plan is to make it easy to get to Manage Dates right after copying your course, then give you the ability to update all the dates in the Manage Dates tool.
Manual calendar events – you can edit the start and end dates of events that were manually created and not tied to activities or content.
Manage Dates display activities in the order in which an instructor would see them in their respective tools.
The course start date and end date appears at the top of the Manage Dates page and acts as a reference for instructors when operating on the dates of the various activities. This info is set by Banner.
New links to the Manage Dates page – The new Review and Manage Dates button appears at the end of copy course components, course import, and course import advanced.
Andy – I am really looking forward to the Continuous Delivery update to the Manage Dates tool, in particular to being able to more easily edit due dates.
One functionality that I would like to see added at some point is an option for Content Module release to be based on “any” versus “all” restrictions. At present for the Content Modules, I can set criteria based release restrictions, in addition to the date restriction, but not instead of the date restriction. There does not seem to be any “automatic” way to allow a student to access a Content Module in advance of a release date that has been set.
Thank-you for communicating about the updates and providing such great information. It is greatly appreciated.
I just want to take a moment to thank you, Andy, for your excellent service, as always :) And especially for the useful hints/suggestions when we go to the D2L page to access our courses. The Manage Dates tool is one I am looking forward to as well, with these much needed changes. Thanks again!