[ARCHIVED] District Calendar

[rislis]

A teacher asks, " Are you going to put District dates and such on the canvas calendar or is that all entered by me?" 

Does this mean as an admin that I have a responsibility to create a district calendar? Still a rookie, here. Have looked at several conversations, but not getting the answer I need.

Thanks!

[rake_9]

I work in a very different context, but I would think that whether you have this responsibility is a local decision.  Do all the district dates need to be in Canvas? Or is that just this one user's expectations? That being said, I'm thinking through what would be involved. 

I believe you would need to have everyone who needs to see the dates enrolled in same course from which the dates are added to the calendar.  That is, I do not  believe there is a generic "all [instance] Canvas users" calendar.  If such a thing exists, I'd love to know about it.

So, in addition to managing all the dates, you'd also need to make sure your enrollments in the course were always up-to-date.

On the positive side, if you did have all your faculty & staff together in a course, there might be other useful things you could do: announcements, resources, discussion, etc.

[kona]

We created a course for all faculty and another for all students. It's the calendar for these courses that we add our Institution wide information. It works pretty well, except when faculty also add it to their individual courses and it looks like a duplicate to students. 

[RobDitto]

There is a great feature idea about adding to Canvas a way to do this which doesn't depend on enrolling everyone in a course:

• https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1623-account-level-calendar-and-sub-account-level-calendar 

[rislis]

Yes, I found this and commented on it. Wish it would happen! Thanks!

[Stef_retired]

 @rislis ‌,  @RobDitto ‌, I had put this suggestion in the comments under the feature idea linked above. Full disclosure: I haven't had occasion to deploy it myself, but I wonder if anyone has investigated using this solution to populate an entire district's calendars with events:

... I wonder if anyone has used the REST API solution described by Jeffrey Anderson MC Admin  at InstructureCon 2013 to populate all published courses with a global event: Adventures with the Canvas REST API (YouTube, 29:14--the part about putting an event on all published courses is at around the 16-minute mark)?

I'm also going to tag  @ryan_corris  on this, because earlier this year he mentioned that he'd check it out. Ryan, did you have a chance to try this, and what were the results?

[kona]

The only potential issue I can see with this is that the student would then see School Closed 2, 3, 4, etc... times on their Canvas Calendar. So once for each course is ok if the students are only in one course. As soon as they start taking more than once, which I'm assuming most do, wouldn't that start clogging up the calendar?

[Stef_retired]

I'm not sure,  @kona ‌; that's the same hypothetical issue Ryan brought up, so I was wondering if he found a way around it.

[ryan_corris]

We have tried to look at many different aspects of how to include district events on calendars.  Our district has not found a satisfactory way to add them.  While it would be nice to have district events automatically show up on the calendar without having to include them with every course calendar (meaning same event(s) on calendar many times), we just decided that course events would be included in course calendars.  Maybe something will change in the future. 

[rswengel]

IF that is done by someone on the district level, that calendar should be a separate calendar just as every course calendar is separate.  That would allow someone to choose to add that calendar view among the others in the list. Forcing those events into the default calendar creates a very crowded calendar for students who must use Canvas for multiple classes.

[jfrielich_ls]

 @rislis ‌,

We developed a county resource course were all teachers in the county would be enrolled. All county dates should appear on that calendar.

Each school has its own course, for teachers, the principals can post all school dates on that calendar.

Following up the chain of command, all central office people can be enrolled in the individual schools course and see how all the dates fall, while avoiding the teachers becoming overwhelmed from seeing events that are not relevant to them.

I find it helpful to export the Calendar into my google calendar, which is now on all of my devices. When my admin team has 'assignments' for the teachers we can read the details on any device I have my google calendar just like our students see our assignments. 

We have some academies/programs within our school that need to coordinate due dates between multiple classes (for example making sure there aren't major assessments in history and math for students within the IB program). This is slightly more complex, but not impossible. Our coordinator would be enrolled in all the program courses, export that canvas calendar containing all the participating courses events into a google calendar then publish that calendar and post it onto our school website. Then all students can view that website to see upcoming events, teachers could subscribe/be invited into the coordinators google calendar to make sure students have a balanced amount of homework/major assessments. 

[kshaffer1]

I've read through the comments, and I agree with a lot of what I've read. We don't put our school calendar events in Canvas for a lot of the reasons listed above. I usually recommend that any teacher who wants to see all of their Canvas items and the school items together pull those separate feeds into a Google Calendar or iCal. 

Now we do have "courses" for faculty/staff and students. These courses serve as ways for us to communicate directly to those groups of people with announcements, discussions, and dates such as when PL sessions are being offered for teachers and when scholarships deadlines are for students. These are the kind of items that you wouldn't see on our school-wise calendar, but they make sense to put on the Canvas calendar for those groups. 

[Robbie_Grant]

 @rislis ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[rswengel]

Whether or not you have that responsibility as Admin is a policy issue.  In our district, neither district nor school-level calendar items are pushed out to student Canvas calendars.  As a teacher, I don't want them there. Doing that would make student calendars too crowded for practical use.