In a recent support ticket, we were told that it was not currently possible to prevent students from posting comments on an assignment prior to its availability date, if the assignment is visible to them.
We would like to have either the assignment availability date, or a separate field, control students' ability to post comments on assignments. This way, we could make it so that students could see assignments in advance of the date on which they were available for submissions, but could not make comments on them.
We are requesting this because, in order for courses to be counted as distance education instead of correspondence for the purposes of Title IV aid, USDE says students cannot complete the courses on their own pace. If students can submit comments to any assignment that they can see, then it's possible for them to submit an assignment file as an attachment to the comment, and receive a grade on that file.
We can train our professors and students not to do this, but it would be best if there were a setting on the assignments to prevent it from happening. As stated above, this could either be the assignment availability date, or else a separate setting.
Furthermore, we would also like to be able to prevent students from posting in ungraded forums prior to a specific date. Currently, students can post in ungraded forums as soon as the course is available. Therefore, we would like to have an availability date for these also. Before that date, we would like students to only have the ability to view the forum, but not to comment in it.