An explanation of what the Calendar in Canvas is, and how best you and your students could use it.
The Calendar helps everyone (you and your students) stay on schedule and up to date. Every course has its own timeline for when things need to be done. Students often study multiple courses concurrently. The Calendar in Canvas is a global feature, meaning users can see all courses assignments and events in one place. This means that students can check what’s happening in all their courses in the one place.
Why would lecturers use the calendar?
- You can use Calendar to remind students of graded Assignments with specific due dates.
- Calendar automatically syncs with other features in Canvas, such as Assignments, Syllabus, and Grades.
- If you create, change, or delete the due date of an Assignment on the Calendar, it will show up in all the others and vice versa.
- You can change dates easily by dragging and dropping assignments from one date to another.
- You can view and create activities in your course as well as events and personal reminders; you can also filter the calendar view to only see specific calendars
Why would students use the calendar?
Calendar is a great feature for students. Students can use the calendar to view their upcoming course events and assignments. They can also create personal events such as study groups. If they want to see only items for a specific course they can filter the calendar view to only see specific calendars.
When items have been completed, they are shown in the Calendar as crossed off (strikethrough).
Example
- The Calendar can be viewed by Week, Month or Agenda. Agenda is simply a list of items in the Calendar (or all Calendars) in date order. Students could treat this like a to-do list. This view can be very useful for students
- The Calendar sidebar shows a quick view calendar and a list of courses and groups.
- Each personal, course, or group calendar is identified by a separate colour.
- You can select a specific calendar or view all calendars together
- The Calendar uses different icons for types of items, e.g. Assignment, Conference, Quizzes, Discussion.
- All-day events display the Events icon and do not include a specific event time.
Hints and Tips
- Show your students how to use the Calendar
- Show students the Agenda view – students like to-do lists
- Calendars can be filtered by selecting or deselecting courses in the sidebar
- Courses customised in the courses drop-down menu as a favourite course will always be listed at the top of the user’s calendar list
- Calendar displays a maximum of 10 course calendars.
- You can view calendar events by day, week, month, or agenda list.
- Encourage your students (and yourself) to use the Calendar Feed function. This allows you to create a calendar in Outlook for your Canvas events.