Date Management in Blackboard

What is Date Management?

The Date Management tool in Blackboard allows you to easily adjust due dates, availability dates, and adaptive release dates either individually, as a group of items, or all of the dates at once.  You can also use Date Management to see a list of all these dates in your course for review. This is a great option particularly if you are inheriting an existing course because you can see which announcements, assignments, tests, discussion forums, or folders have dates associated with them and whether these are due dates, availability dates, or adaptive release dates.
Note: Date Management will not change any dates that are mentioned in descriptions of assignments, items, or folders; those dates need to be adjusted manually.

Why Use Date Management?

  • Get a quick overview of all dated materials in your course.
  • Save time when updating your dev site for the next semester.

Getting Started with Date Management

To access the tool in your course site, select Course Tools on the Control Panel, and then click on Date Management. Here, you will have the option to change all the due and availability dates in your course based on either the semester start date, or by a fixed number of days.

Before doing so, you might want to see a list of all the dates in your course for review on one screen. For that, select “List All Dates for Review” and click “Start.”

To return to the options on the initial screen, click “Run Date Management Again” in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. You can shift all the dates in your course based on the semester start date or by a fixed number of days. This might require a little arithmetic, particularly if the new semester begins on a different day of the week than the preceding one: for example, if the fall semester began on a Thursday, but spring classes begin on a Monday. Note that after adjusting all of the dates in your site at once you can still adjust individual dates back or ahead, as needed.

Important: Due dates for third party tools such as Turnitin or VoiceThread will not be displayed using Date Management and must be adjusted individually. The best way to edit Turnitin or VoiceThread due dates is through the Grade Center: Navigate to your course’s Grade Center, click on the downward arrow next to the column’s title, and select “Edit Column Information.” On the next page, scroll down to change that assignment’s due date.

Support Materials
Blackboard’s Help page on using Date Management.
Short webinar on Date Management from the University of Miami.

Help
Email us at: facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu