In one class, different learners can have their own, personalised dates for courses, sections and assessed tasks using individual opening dates. When you choose a start date for a learner, the rest of the dates for sections and assessed tasks are pulled through from the study plan an author set up for the course.

This means the dates for each learner can be relative to when they started the course, rather than the same dates for all.

In this article, you'll find out how to give learners their own individual opening date and why you might want to do this.

To give learners their own individual opening date:

To change a learner's individual opening date, you'll need to remove the learner from the class activation and then re-add them with the updated date.

Individual opening dates can also be set via the API, where you can add multiple learners in the same request and specify each learner's start date.

To understand more about how these individual opening dates work, let’s look at an example.

Let's say an author has set up a course with this study plan below.

Then, a manage user creates a class activation and adds two learners with individual opening dates.

Flloyd and Hannah’s start/opening and due/closing dates all flow through automatically from the study plan the author has set up.

Facilitators can see these learners' due dates for assessed tasks under Marking in the Class Console and can filter their Class Console for who is currently studying (today’s date is within the learner’s course dates) and/or who has an assessment due in 10 days (or overdue).

Any learners with overdue assessments have their assessment Status as Overdue in red.

Learner relative dates are perfect for “Start any time” or “frequent intake” courses so that learners can have dates that are relative to when they started the course (rather than everyone having to have the same due dates).

We use learner relative dates for our iQualify Skills courses where people can self-enrol whenever they want. In our courses, we set the study plan up so that the course is open for 365 days, but that the quiz is due on day 28 (four weeks after they started).

For us, this means we can have just one version of the course on our dash, that is open for the whole year, but learners still get due dates relevant to them. In fact, we use that quiz due date to send personalised and targeted emails to remind them to complete the quiz and earn their badge for the course.

Some partners use more of the study plan features to set open dates for sections, and due dates for more frequent assessments. For instance, so that learners can enrol anytime, but where new content is released at the start of every week and a short assessment is due at the end of every third week. This means facilitators can monitor and support all their learners from one Class Console page - seeing assessments that are upcoming and marking those that have been submitted.

Other partners use individual opening dates for “block” courses, where groups of learners are all enrolled at the start of the month and then the next cohort enrolled next month. Again, this means just one course on facilitators’ dashboards (rather than 12 each year) but each monthly intake still has due dates relative to the month they started.