The Canvas Calendar Trap

Hi all,

If you are one of those students who comes into Canvas and goes straight to the Canvas calendar to see what is due, I have a warning for you: You may be missing important information and you may, indeed, be doing more work than you need to.

I design my classes so that student access everything they need to through the modules and then do my best hide everything else, making modules and assignments I’m not using this quarter invisible to students. Canvas doesn’t make this easy. I may need to check three separate settings to make sure things are invisible and, alas, sometimes I miss one … or two. (Oops.)

As a result the assignment is invisible everywhere except the calendar. So, if you head straight to the calendar and begin working on what you find without first checking the module, well, you may end up working on something you didn’t need to.

Another hazard in doing that is that often my assignments are not standalone events: There are other elements in the module that relate to the assignment—readings, videos, maybe worksheets—and if you skip over those you likely won’t do as well as you would like.

Bottom line? Just get in the habit of working through the modules.

Tim