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Home > Help & Support > Knowledge Base > Teaching & Learning > Canvas > Incompletes in Canvas

Incompletes in Canvas

Once a course ends, students can no longer work in the course (although they retain view access by default). The instructor must update course settings to allow a student to continue to interact with the course. While the end date of the course could be changed, this affects all students. Therefore, the recommended practice is to create a new section inside the course. Section end dates override the course end date. Follow the steps below to create a new section for a student with an incomplete (or any user at any course role).

Please Note: If it is past your course participation end date (as seen on the course's Settings page, normally two weeks after the end of the semester), you will need to open your course temporarily before you complete the following steps. You can open your course by changing the end date to a date sometime in the future. Once you have completed the steps below, change it back to the date it originally ended. If you are setting up the course for an incomplete before the semester ends, you can disregard this step.

Step 1: Create a new section in your course

Set up a manually created section for the student(s). We recommend naming the section “Incompletes” for clarity. Follow the steps in this guide. If you have multiple students with Incompletes, you can add them to one section or create one for each if you want different end dates for each.

Step 2: Set the end date for the section

Set the section end date to match when the student needs to finish the course. If you don’t do this step, the student will have access to your course indefinitely until you manually close or delete the section. Do not set a start date. This guide shows you how to set an end date.

Step 3: Assign the student to the new section

On the course’s People page, follow these steps in this guide. Note: a student can be in multiple sections. You will not be removing the student from the current course, only adding them to an additional section. If you receive an error message when add students to a section, you must temporary update the course participation end date – see note at top of this page. If you cannot change this date, contact ITS Canvas Admins for help.

Step 4: Add new assignment due dates for the new section

If you set Until or Due Dates for items, you will need to add additional due dates for the new section, to each of the assignments/quizzes the student needs to complete. Follow this guide. We do not recommend changing the existing due dates as you lose record of when items were due and it affects your course setup for future course copies.

Last modified: February 19, 2025

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