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A new version of the fixed issues list has been published.

The following item(s) was/were added.

Maryna,This feature applies to the New Content Experience. When D2L introduced the NCE, the ability to add due dates on discussions was lost. They are adding it back for the NCE, but only an initial post date. We're pushing the development team to add additional due dates for discussions, as well as functionality to specify how many replies are required, but it has not been made clear if and when that extra functionality will be rolled out. 
For now, as long as your institution doesn't switch to the New Content Experience, this update won't impact you. But it is something you need to consider before changing from Classic to New Content. 

As for Mandi’s comment, we think it’s better that it doesn’t specify whether the due date is for the initial or reply post. Since there’s only one due date available right now, we’re opting are going to put the date that replies are due, not the initial post. We also have been asking our faculty to create calendar events in lieu of these due dates. We’re probably not going to ask them to do that once we enable the due dates. They’ll just be asked to post an announcement each week reminding students of that initial post due date.

If you are reading this and your institution is like ours, where you rely on multiple due dates for discussions, please contact your Customer Success Rep and ask them to put pressure on the product development team finish phase 2 of this update, which is to allow for multiple due dates on discussions and to allow specification on how many replies are required. I know there’s a PIE item out there that you can upvote, too.

We’re grateful to the team for working on this and making due dates a reality for us.

We've just been creating calendar events as a reminder for each post due date and letting students manually check completion of discussion forums. I agree, this isn't the functionality requested so it doesn't seem useful overall without the second due date. It will also be confusing for students because it doesn't look like there's anything that tells students it is for the initial thread from what I could see in the notes?

Unfortunately, the new feature is not the addition of a second due date function; it's just that the existing due date setting will be linked to the initial post. This new feature won't provide the functionality we've been looking for. As a workaround over the years, we've been putting a checklist in every module. In the checklist, we add an entry for the "Module 7 Discussion Initial Post" and tag it with a due date, then a second entry for the "Module 7 Discussion - Two Peer Response Posts" and tag that with the later due date. This way, students have both due dates on their course calendar. Hope this helps!

@Maryna.Z.118 I'm confused about the December release notes. It says instructors will be able to add a discussion due date for the first post. However, from what I'm seeing we can still only add one due date for discussions. We could already do this in the classic content experience. We need to be able to add a first post due date and a follow-up reply due date. Is that not what this is?