Good point about daylight savings - that's probably one of the reasons for edX going with UTC. 

I'd rather not develop new ui widgets for this, tempting though it may be. We can live with the instructor complaints until we can have proper local timezones. 

- Peter

On Oct 17, 2013, at 9:05 AM, Chris Rossi wrote:

> In lms/templates/courseware/instructor_dashboard.html:
> 
> > +    <H2>${_("Individual due date extensions")}</h2>
> > +
> > +    <p>
> > +      ${_("Specify the {platform_name} email address or username of a student here:").format(platform_name=settings.PLATFORM_NAME)}
> > +      <input type="text" name="unique_student_identifier">
> > +    </p>
> > +    <p>
> > +      ${_("Choose the graded unit:")}
> > +      <select name="url">
> > +        %for title, url in units_with_due_dates:
> > +        <option value="${url}">${title}</option>
> > +        %endfor
> > +      </select>
> > +    </p>
> > +    <p>
> > +      ${_("Specify the individual due date and time in UTC:")}
> What if I just add a pull down for timezone that defaults to UTC? On submission all dates get converted to UTC, but professors can express time in a local, to them, timezone.
> 
> One issue with just putting the message you describe is during daylight savings time (for another two weeks) the offset from UTC is actually 4 hours for the east coast, then it will go back to 5. That just starts getting clunky to explain.
> 
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