Ability to show Discussion topics prior to availability for posting

We have students who want to look at Discussion topics on graded Discussions prior to when the Discussions are available for comments. This way they know what is coming up in the course.

However, we can't open up the Discussions for comments prior to the week that they are set to become available, since that would mean that students could take the course as a self-paced course. If they were able to do that, then it would count as a "correspondence course" for the purposes of the US Department of Education, and thus could make the program in which it was offered a correspondence program, rather than a distance education program. This could mean we wouldn't be able to provide Title IV financial aid to students in that program.

Your support team let us know yesterday that we can't show the questions for the Discussion prior to when it becomes available for comments unless we put them in the Assignment description.

However, this means double the work when we are creating or Discussions. It also means that if we change the wording of Discussion questions we have to remember to change them in the Assignment description also.

We would like Discussion topics to show to students if the "visible to students before available" checkbox is checked.

If that would cause problems for other schools, then could you create another option on the Discussion that would enable us to do this?