How do I bulk delete field collection items that are part of a content type? I have a Drupal 7 site with a content type that is for adding courses and courses have a field collection that has multiple fields for Date, Venue, Location(Province)

Each course can have 1 or many dates, venues and locations and these get updated, usually by the company offering the course(User managed content). I can update the course content and field collections for them using feeds module but the problem I have is that the old dates are not being overwritten. So we end up with old dates which are no longer relevant plus the new dates.

The question, is there a way to delete the old dates in bulk? I can't seem to get VBO and views to do this. Am I missing a module that would allow me to select all the field collection fields for a particular node and delete all without having to delete them 1 at a time?
I created a view that lets us filter by username(so that we can delete for a particular company/user) and course dates(so that we can filter courses with selected dates). It will delete all fields within the field collections for the selected courses. Courses display in rows for each date instance, e.g. if a course has many dates then it displays in a new row with each date field collection item.

I created a content view with a relationships to the field collections-field collection items, author and content field of the field collections attached to my content type for which I selected Delta=All).

I then added fields with the course title, date, venue, location and field collection item ID and displayed in a table with the VBO set to delete the selected field collection items for each instance.

I have filter criteria for the content type, username(author)-exposed, and field collection item for the date-exposed so that I can filter by date to delete old items.

I hope I was able to explain the solution that worked for me so that it can at least offer a clue to someone else with a similar problem.