Setting open and close dates

When you’re running an experiment, it’s important that students complete their assignments in a specific order. That’s particularly important when your experiment involves an informed consent assignment, because if a student opens another assignment before completing informed consent, they’ll automatically be excluded from the experiment (and there are lots of good, ethically oriented reasons for this).

If there’s a certain order in which you want your students to complete assignments, the easiest way to make that happen is by setting open and close dates for your assignments in Canvas. Follow these steps to set your open and close dates:

• Go to your Canvas Assignments. Open the assignment for which you’d like to set open and close dates. You’ll see the Terracotta experiment screen there (if you’re in an assignment you created in Terracotta). In the upper right corner, click Edit Assignment Settings (above Speed Grader).

• You’ll see lots of different settings on this screen. Scroll to the bottom of the page, until you see this:

• Set your Available from date and your Until date. Be sure that the Until date is still before the next assignment’s Available from date in order to be sure your students proceed through the experiment assignments in the order you prefer.

• Click Save and do the same from other assignments, as needed. Set these dates for as many assignments as you’d like.