This is a known issue that has been reported to Feedback Fruits. If a solution is developed by the vendor, this guide will be updated or deleted if no longer necessary.
There is an issue with due dates on Feedback Fruits assignments that can cause overdue reminders to be sent to students. This can cause unwanted stress for students, worried that their assessment hasn’t been received or completed. This short guide explains why this happens and presents two workaround options that can hopefully reduce unwanted concerns for both you and your students.
Why does this happen?
Feedback Fruits assignments typically have multiple deadlines, such as an assignment submission, reviews given to peers, and feedback on received reviews. Blackboard on the other-hand only recognises a single due date. When you create a Feedback Fruits assignment, only the first deadline is synced to Blackboard. Therefore as soon as the first deadline passes, Blackboard will think students haven’t completed the assignment and send over reminders telling them it’s overdue.
What are the workarounds?
There are two main options:
Clear the due date from Blackboard
If you clear the due date from the Blackboard content item that links to your Feedback Fruits assignment, no reminders will be sent out by Blackboard. Students should still receive an email directly from Feedback Fruits notifying them of their individual deadlines.
- Click on the ellipsis (three dots icon) to the right of the link to your Feedback Fruits assignment and choose Edit.
- Click inside the date field and press backspace to clear the due date.
- Click Save and check that the item is now showing no due date.
Tip 💡 – We recommend typing the due dates into the description field, so they are clearly signposted to your students.
Leave it as is but warn students in advance
You can always just leave the settings as they are but warn students in advance to ignore any reminders sent by Blackboard after the initial file hand-in. If this is the case, we strongly recommend giving students clear signposting, such as:
- Warning students about this issue when introducing the peer review assignment.
- Sending out an Announcement to tell students to ignore due date reminders as long as they’ve submitted the first file hand-in on time. This is also a good time to remind students that it’s best to check the due dates within Feedback Fruits itself.
- Including due dates in the description field of the Feedback Fruits link.
Reminder: Check you have Automatic Zeros turned off
On a related note, this is a good opportunity to check you don’t have the option ‘assign automatic zeros to overdue work’ turned on in the Gradebook settings. This is a troublesome setting, that could potentially assign students with a 0 points mark for their assignment after the first due date passes.