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Instructional and Information Technology Services (IITS)

Notice Details

Event thread is sorted in reverse order, with the most current notice at the top of the thread and the original post at the bottom.

Cougar Courses - Daylight Savings Time Error Shifts Assignments One Hour Earlier
Audiences: Faculty  Students 
Resolved: Monday, 11/02/2020 03:10 PM

This morning IITS received a report that Cougar Courses assignments, quizzes, forums, and other assessments had shifted one hour earlier as of Sunday, November 2nd. After investigation, IITS found that this issue is related to a Daylight Savings Time (DST) setting on the Cougar Courses server.

All future assignments, quizzes, forums, and other assessments created prior to 9am today, November 2nd, will start and end one hour earlier. This issue will affect any items with dates/deadlines after 1am Sunday, November 1st. IITS has evaluated options to correct the current issue for all affected users; however, none of the options offer a way to correct the problem without possibly initiating further disruptions.

All faculty who utilize Cougar Courses are requested to log in to the system, verify the assessments’ start and end times for the remainder of the semester, and adjust any erroneous ones accordingly.

Background:

Changes to USA Daylight Savings Time standards have caused various Cougar Courses issues in the past related to the use of time zones. To address the issue, over seven years ago IITS shifted to using a specific Canadian regional time zone (America/Dawson) that resolved the problem. IITS has continued to use this region, as changing system configuration settings related to Cougar Courses can have unintended outcomes.

Unbeknownst to IITS, in March 2020 several regions in Canada rolled forward with Daylight Savings Time and permanently started observing that time with no further seasonal adjustment. In order to correct the DST observance, IITS adjusted the time zone to the Los Angeles region. All items created prior to this change are still marked as America/Dawson, which is the cause of the time error.