Thank you
Yes, I am referring to the end date in Course settings.
There can be a number of definitions of "end", e.g:
1. stop all access to the course by everyone except the administrators of the course. This is achieved by hiding course visibility, but there is currently no option of choosing a date for this.
2. inform the students of the date when the course disappears from their list of active courses. This appears to be the effect of the existing "Course end date".
3. prevent students submitting work, but enabling them to view and
download tutors' responses. This is achieved in edit settings for individual quizzes, but cannot be implemented for the course as a whole or in part. (My course (repeated 3 times/year) is divided into 14 Units (with quizzes and assignments), grouped into 4 monthly Blocks with a firm deadline for each Block. It would be useful administratively (for me) to choose a group of items to prevent submissions but enabling student viewing of marked work, i.e. at the end of each month/ Block - but that is probably a complication too far.)
4. prevent students submitting work and not enabling them to view tutors' responses, but allowing them to view the course materials as a whole or in part. (This could be implemented before the course opens formally or after it ends. The existing Course start date help message mentions enabling logs but does not clarify if student work submissions are affected.) This option would enable students to return to the teaching materials for revision of the subject, review of the tutor feedback etc.
As far as my students are concerned, the course does not finish until their work is marked and retrieved, and the final course marks delivered to the students. This can take up to 2 weeks after the course's formal end i.e. when the submissions stop. During this period, the student would expect that the course is still listed in his navigation window, since it is still live.
At the moment, adminstration of courses cannot be be set up ahead of time (and some courses start and finish on New Year's day), so I have to go into the Moodle site then to change the individual resource settings to open and close the courses.
My immediate "request" is for a setting to achieve option 3 for the whole course which otherwise does not change visibility.