[ARCHIVED] Need to turn off Calendar, please help!

[BobbieGrey]

Y'all, I need help getting rid of the obnoxious calendar feature on Canvas. It's driving me crazy. I have hidden from my students everything that could possibly feed into the calendar and still it persists at finding incorrect due dates for assignments and confusing students. The only help I can find on this topic is a post from 2017 that asks how to turn off the calendar and the answer was "You can't." Please tell me this is not true. I need to be able to enter assignments into Canvas for my own purposes and not get nervous that they are going to mysteriously show up on my student's calendar. I've hidden the "assignments" category and I do not "publish" assignments until after they are graded so the students have access to the grades. Help! I want students to read the due dates on their syllabus and follow that like big girls and boys. I want them to take personal responsibility and not rely on me to enter things into their calendar for them. No thank you!

[mia_taylor]

I agree - an option for designers and instructors to choose whether or not they want activities listed in the Calendar, To-do, and Syllabus Course Summary section to be hyperlinked? Could we explore adding this option so WE CAN CHOOSE on our end whether hyperlinks in these places are useful or not in a particular course or program? 

~Mia👩‍🏫

[kevin_redding]

What I don't understand is why hidden assignments are on my calendar.  How does that make any sense?  The point of keeping things hidden is that the students do NOT see them.  It is mind-bogglingly stupid to put those on the calendar.  So far, I cannot find a way to turn that off.

[bruni]

To Canvas Execs,

I've been using Canvas LMS for many years now (not by choice), and I want to say that, imo, Canvas isn't doing a good job of listening to instructors and giving them what they need in a timely manner. You make a pretense of listening but in reality, you market from within, forcing new features on instructors, you offer a poorly designed, old, cluttered user interface, and you provide few options to turn off features instructors don't want. Instructors need to be able to customize their user interface as much as possible. Your job is to give them as many options as possible. Get with it!

If you want to go on forcing features on instructors, then here's one thing you absolutely must do for us:

Give instructors toggle on/off switches for every tool/feature you have in your LMS, like Calendars and the list of items on the right of the home page--"Import Existing Content," et al, to name a couple.

In the near future, be the LMS company that offers instructors the option of a course shell which allows them to pick and choose the elements they want in it, and where to place them. This will help ensure you keep the lion's share of LMS users. If you don't do it, someone watching will...and then it's bye-bye.

Just sayin'...

[KristinL]

Hi @bruni  - Thank you for sharing your frustrations and your perspectives openly in the Community. I’m sorry to hear you are frustrated, and I want to share that the Community Team and Product Team are working together to address your concerns. While it’s not a complete response yet, I wanted to be sure to reply before the weekend. More to come!

[chriscas]

Hi @bruni,

Just wanted to share some thoughts as a Canvas Admin for a higher-ed institution on your frustrations, both for you and other potential readers of this thread...

I think at the core, the issue is really who does (and/or should) have control of various elements in the LMS.  As I see it, there are three main groups (students, faculty/teachers, and administrators) and some others you may or may not have at your institution (instructional designers, teacher assistants, librarians, etc).  In my opinion, Instructure has a very hard job to balance the needs of all of these different groups, who have different needs and are sometimes in direct conflict with each other.

The calendar is probably a very good example of this balancing act.  From a teachers perspective, you'd probably like to be able to control (almost) everything about your course in the LMS.  That seems reasonable, as you're probably the main contact students have for the course.  From a student perspective, they would really like as much consistency as possible among their courses.  It can be a very confusing experience for students when their courses all work very differently, so as much as I also like option switches for things, they don't always make sense, especially at a course level.  From an institutional admin perspective, we usually try to look at both sides and sometimes have to choose one, which can be very hard...  Instructure is in a similar position, but instead of just looking at one institution's users, they have to consider things globally.

Historically, it seems that Instructure has been the most student-centric LMS of the major players.  They've designed Canvas so that it's hopefully easy for the student to find what they need to do without hunting around, and at the same time it's hopefully not too hard for instructors to set things up.  Now sometimes  the functionality you're looking for might not be there or may work differently that you'd like, both of which  are super frustrating.

Back to the calendar in particular...  Almost everything there (and the related to-do lists and syllabus) are populated based on due dates entered for assignments, quizzes, discussions (and optionally dates for pages).  You can add additional items to the calendar as well, but not really remove the auto-populated items.  This is usually helpful for students so that they can see their upcoming assignments across many classes, get alerts from the mobile app, etc...  I know a lot of faculty want students going into their course instead of directly going to a specific assignment through the calendar or to-do list, but from what we hear from our students, they just don't operate in that way anymore (sigh).  I have a feeling that if the calendar and/or to-do list population was a course option, it would make some teachers happy, but probably have a lot of negative consequences for students.

I know this is a bit of a lengthy post, but I want to close in again saying I do share your frustrations that many things in Canvas don't work as I'd prefer either.  I think perhaps having an institutional opt-out for the calendar could work (so it wasn't available in Canvas at all, and students would not be relying on it for any information), but with the above considerations in mind, I think it would be very problematic as a course-level option.  There are other considerations with options like this, such as documentation becoming more complex as users have to be told they may or may not see certain things, but I didn't want to even go down that road yet...

Maybe this sheds some new light on things, or maybe you'll just be in total disagreement, but that's okay too!  If we all agreed on everything, there probably wouldn't be as much need for this great community to exist.

-Chris

[kevin_redding]

Hi Chris, 

I do appreciate what you are saying here.  The balancing act can be tough.  My specific problem with the calendar is that it populates with assignments that are unpublished.  I do not se any way that it helps the student to see an assignment due on a calendar that they cannot access, because it is unpublished.  In fact, I see that potentially as a huge source of frustration for students! 

So, hopefully we can agree that assignments should not go to the calendar until they are published.  Unless you can give me a credible pedagogical rationale for the way Canvas currently does things, I persist in my opinion that it is wrong.

Best regards

Kevin

[chriscas]

Hi @kevin_redding,

Can you clarify whether the assignments themselves are unpublished, or whether you've hidden the assignments menu...  I don't believe unpublished assignments should appear on a students to-do list, but if you've only hidden the assignments menu then the published assignments inside would still appear on the to-do list (as hiding the navigation menu is really more of a course design thing so teachers could link to assignments with modules/pages/announcements without the students seeing the entire list).

-Chris