Students LOVE the Brightspace calendar! What’s not to like? Instead of going searching through content, all due dates pop up in one place.
Let’s help them out. We’ll learn all about adding content dates on Brightspace so your students can be more organized and ready for your course.
- Brightspace date terminology
- Add dates when you create content
- Add or edit dates from your Content page – Module dates – Topic Dates – Edit Dates
- Add dates to Checklist items
- Add dates to Announcements
- Create an event
- Manage all date with the Manage Dates tool – Offset course dates
- Add your Brightspace Calendar to Google Calendar + default email notifications
Brightspace date terminology
First, let’s talk about what different date terms mean in Brightspace.
📅 Start Date: Opens access to content and assignment submission. Before the start date, students will only be able to see the content title.
📅 Due Date: This displays when the assignment is due. It does not close access to submitting assignments. If students submit work past the due date, the submission will show the amount of time “late by”. Most content with a due date will automatically appear in the calendar.
📅 End Date: Closes access to content and assignment submission. After the end date, students will only be able to see the content title. If you want to give partial credit for late work, do not set an end date. Most content with an end date will automatically appear in the calendar.
📅 Special access: You can use special access conditions to open content access certain students outside the specified dates. This will be a case by case basis.
📅 Availability: You will sometimes see this header before the option to add a start date and end dates. These start and end dates work the same as listed above.
Note about Availability: Be careful with Availability and Hide from Users. Clicking the Hide From Users checkbox will hide content from users until you uncheck the box. If you add an Availability start date, that WILL NOT override the Hide from Users option. We recommend you only use one.
📅 Locking Options: In Discussions, you will see this header before option to add a start date and end dates. These start and end dates DO NOT work the same as listed above. These dates lock and unlock the ability to add to the discussion. Before the start date and after the end date, the discussion is read only.
📅 Display to calendar: Not all dates/times show up automatically on the Brightspace calendar. Click this box to push these dates out to the calendar.
Add dates when you create content
You can easily add dates as you are putting together your content.
When you are editing your Assignment, Quiz, Discussion, Survey, Self-assessment or Grade Item, click on the Restrictions tab. From here you can add a Due Date and Availability dates. It also shows you the time zone for the times you set.

For a Quiz, Discussion, Survey, Self-assessment, or Grade Item, you will also see the checkbox to Display in Calendar. It is shown under the Availability dates. This pushes your availability dates to the Brightspace calendar.

A Note about Grade Items: We do NOT usually recommend adding a date to a Grade Item. This restricts viewing of the grade, not any of the content for that Grade Item. One exception to this is if you want to release a set of grades all at once. Then you could set a Start Date to each Grade Item and all those Grade Items would be visible on that day.
A Discussion forum or topic has more date features with the Locking Options. You can also check Display in Calendar to push these dates out to the calendar.

Add or edit dates from your Content page
You can add Start, Due, and End Dates from the Content page. You can do this for whole modules or individual topics. If you have already added dates when creating your content, you can edit dates from the Content page as well.
Module dates
To add dates to a module, click on Add dates and restrictions… under the module heading. This opens up a section to add dates.
Then you can click under Start Date, Due Date, or End Date to add a start, due or end date.


After you have entered your dates, click the Update button that appears to apply your dates.

Topic dates
To add dates to a topic, click on the divet button next to the topic title to bring up the topic menu. Then choose Edit Properties In-place. Then you can follow the steps outline above for adding dates to a module.

Edit Topic or Module dates
Any dates that you have already added to a topic or module will show up under the title with a little clock icon. Click on the date to bring up the editing options.


Add dates to Checklist items
You can add a due date to individual Checklist items. These do not apply to whole Checklists or Checklist categories.
On the edit page for your checklist item, scroll down below the content editor. There is an option to add a Due Date for the Checklist item. Check the box next to Display in Calendar to push this Due Date to the Brightspace calendar.

Add dates to Announcements
You can add dates to Announcements. They only control when announcements are shown – they do not show up on the calendar.
On the edit Announcement page, availability dates are found after you scroll down past the headline and content editor. You can add a Start Date and End Date. The End Date will remove your announcement. You must check the box next to “Remove announcement based on end date” before you can add an End Date.

Create an event
It’s not all about due dates on the calendar! You can also set one-time events (like an optional lecture opportunity) or recurring events (like regular office hours).
Manage all dates with the Manage Dates tool
You can view and edit your dates all in one place with the Manage Dates tool. You can manage dates from
- Announcements
- Assignments
- Calendar
- Checklist
- Content (Modules/Topics)
- Discussions
- Grades (Grade Items)
- Quizzes
- Surveys
Watch the video below for a tour of the Manage Tool in Brightspace or keep scrolling for the video transcript and screenshots
Video transcript and screenshots
There are a lot of different places where you can add dates in Brightspace, and luckily for us we have this handy dandy Manage Dates tool where we can see a list of our items with any dates associated or any items that can have a date associated. So to get to this Manage Dates tool, you go to your Course Admin. Choose Manage Dates.

From here some options at the top. You can filter by specific tools if you want to pick a specific content type to look at, or you can choose this Show Advanced Filter Options to filter by the name, different dates, the duration, which is how long between the start and end dates.

And then calendar status. I like the calendar status because if I went to Not Displayed in Calendar, I can go down here and then it shows me a list of anything that’s not on the calendar, which means that it’s not showing there for the students. And then I can turn it on to the calendar if I need too. We’ll turn that off.

OK then at the top here you have two bulk options. You can Bulk Edit Dates and Bulk Offset Dates.

So for bulk editing dates this is helpful if you’ve put in a bunch of content and haven’t given any dates to it, you can take groups of it and assign dates to open. If I put in a bunch of content for week one, I can go through, check the boxes for anything that needs to open on the start date a week one, click the Bulk Edit Dates and then put an availability start date for week one.
And I can also tell it to display in the calendar or any due dates. So you can edit multiple dates at a time.
Another option is this Bulk Offset Date.
When you offset dates, you move it forward or backwards by a specific number of days and you can do that with multiple things. There’s actually a good Brightspace video on this, so I’m not going to talk too much about that.
But for example, you might use this if you’ve imported your course for new semester and you want the content to be spaced out the same way, you can move the dates forward for the new semester for all of your assignments and content.

So let’s look down here in the list. So the list gives you the content type, the name. And the dates that you have, the duration which is measured in days. And a checkbox for whether it should be included on the calendar and then this visibility status.
If you have something that has a start date in an end date, it will show you that it’s Visible If The Conditions Are Met, which means the conditions of it’s a date between those two dates, or it’ll show you whether it’s visible or hidden for the students.

You can also see some items have the N/A for not available. This Cat Quiz Extras is a checklist I’ve created to go with my cat quiz. And checklists do not take dates, so it’s on here, but you can’t have any dates associated with it.
But if I scroll down I can see this Read About Cats, which is a checklist item on that same checklist, and it has a space where you can associate a due date with it and you can just click on that to add it.
So what do we do with dates in here? If there is already a date you can click on it to edit. And then save. If there is no date, you can click on this little teeny tiny hyphen in here to add a date, or you can come over to the name and click the divot (Context Menu) to bring up the menu to edit the dates. You can also offset dates for individual items here. And that’s it for our Manage Date tool.

Hopefully this will help you in seeing an overview of all the dates for your courses.
Offset course dates
With the Bulk Offset Dates option, you can move a group of dates forward or backward by a specific number of days.
You might use this if you have copied you course and want to move all your dates forward for the new semester. Or there was a snow day so you want to extend the end date of this months assignments by a day.
Add your Brightspace Calendar to Google Calendar + default email notifications
You can easily add events and due dates from your Brightspace calendar into Google Calendar or other calendar apps using a subscribe URL. We’ll outline the steps for Google Calendar but you can use the same URL to add to other calendar apps.
This works for instructors and students to see class due dates and events.
Video Transcript & Screenshots
It’s easy to import Brightspace calendar, due dates, and events into a different calendar app that you might use more often. So today I’m going to show you how to do that with Google Calendar.
Click on course calendar from your main home page. You can see I have at least just one event here on the 9th. To enable sharing of this calendar, go to Settings. Then choose Enable Calendar Feeds and click Save.


Now that our page is reloaded, you have this new button that says Subscribe, so we’re going to click on that.

From here you can choose which calendars to subscribe to. You can do all calendars and tasks which will pull in everything from Brightspace, including all your courses. Tasks only or specific courses or just calendar for Meredith College.
I’m going to do all calendars and tasks and then it gives you a URL that we’re going to copy. So just copy that URL and we’ll
use it in Google Calendar. Then we can just close this.

Now go on over to your Google calendar. On the left by other calendars, you click the plus button to add a new a new calendar, and choose From URL. And from here you just paste in the URL you just copied from Brightspace. You can make it publicly accessible or leave this unchecked just for you to see it and click Add Calendar.


Now my calendar has been added. And you can see my one due date that was on the 9th that I have an assignment due. And you can see in the list all courses is my calendar, and you can also change the color if you want to have a specific color for notification so you can see it better.

You can also hover on the calendar title. Click the three little dots from your menu and go to Settings. From here, if you scroll to the bottom you can Unsubscribe and remove this calendar if you’d like, or back up near the top, you can choose event notifications. You can Add a Notification for all of these events and due dates that are pulling in from Brightspace.

I could set up to have an email that is one day ahead of when it has happening. So if I have something due on the 9th, I’m going to get an email one day ahead of that that says it’s due the next day. This is going to be for anything that’s pulled in from Brightspace and it just automatically notifies you.
So back to Brightspace. You can also just subscribe to one course at a time and then when you add it to your Google calendar, you can change the different colors. Maybe one course is going to be blue, one course is going to be green, so you can keep track of them like that. It just depends on how you want to set it up, whether you are importing it all at once or one class at a time.
Add your Brightspace Calendar to your iPhone calendar
Click on course calendar from your main Brightspace home page (not an individual course home page). To enable sharing of this calendar, go to Settings. Then choose Enable Calendar Feeds and click Save.


Now that our page is reloaded, you have this new button that says Subscribe, so we’re going to click on that.

From here you can choose which calendars to subscribe to. You can do all calendars and tasks which will pull in everything from Brightspace, including all your courses. Tasks only or specific courses or just calendar for Meredith College.
I’m going to do all calendars and tasks and then it gives you a URL that we’re going to copy. So just copy that URL and we’ll
use it for the iPhone calendar. Then we can just close this.

On your iPhone, go into Settings, then choose Mail > Contacts > Calendars.
Choose Add Account, then Other, and then Add Subscribed Calendar.
Head over to the Apple Subscribe to calendars in Mac to see full instructions based on your macOS version.
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