[Assignments] Parents and Students Need to know the date an assignment is assigned

[mlmodelski]

When I enter a new assignment into the calendar it is posted on the due date and NOT on the day it is assigned.  Not good.  It would be much better for parents and students using the calendar to know when the assignment was assigned AND the due date. Very important.  Many parents rely on looking at my calendar every day.  If they don't see the assignment they have no idea when it was assigned NOR when it was due.  

Simple fix is to have it show up on both the assigned date and the due date.

Please fix ASAP as I have parents emailing me and soon I am going to have to call our district office and ask them what to do...

[bdalton_sales]

Adding an assigned date in addition to a due date will be confusing as i can 100% say you will get parents saying 'why are you only giving them the assginment today when its due today?'    It will clutter the calendar and make it hard to see the actual due dates.  Note thar the colour coding you see is on a per user basis, you might see a class as green but the sudent could set thst to anything they like. So colour coding assigned differently to due also breaks the course associations. 

What is better is to utilise the noticifations system and the parent app or observer accounts.  When you give students a new assignment they will get notifications via a bunch of mechanisms as can their parents.  Add an announcement to be sure.

[apelt]

 @mlmodelski ‌, this is a low-tech fix, but you could add the date assigned to the assignment title. For example, if you assign a book report on August 28, you could name the assignment "Book Report (Assigned 8/28)." 

[drubin1]

You make a good point. However, I avoid that issue by having a schedule posted in my courses that shows all the start and end dates and chapters assigned, as well as footnoting the assignments.

[olexar]

I can provide a concrete example that would make an optional “assigned” date quite useful. I primarily teach blended courses. For an on-campus exam (an “on-paper assignment”), should I set the “due” time for the start or end of class? I believe that a lot of folks would be surprised to learn that this confuses students. It does. 

A pervious comment mentions the use of something such as an Excel sheet for the course calendar. That does solve this problem; however, if we should just use Excel, why have a calendar at all? I like the functionality that comes from using the calendar. My students do too. 

Learning management systems all seem to be designed for 100% online courses. The issue is that many—if not most—courses have on-campus components. 

[davidrcrockett]

Could Canvas just add the "to-do" check box and calendar picker to assignments, like on pages? This seems like this would solve this problem and would help a ton. 

[eeckhardt]

Looking at the original idea posted, and the comments and workarounds that follow, I believe I've pinpointed the problem:

"There really is nothing to 'fix', since this is the designed behavior of assignments and the calendar..."

It's this "designed behavior" of the calendar that needs to be fixed, eliminated really, because it's not the way most other interactive calendars work, and is especially counter-intuitive to the way we teach students to use an interactive calendar in school.

I think it's safe to say most school teachers post daily or weekly agendas on whatever calendar they use, paper or electronic.  We outline exactly what topics will be covered that day, and include assignments given on that day.  Furthermore, if a student misses a day of class they are not going to look at the course calendar and say, "Hm, I missed class yesterday, let me check the entire rest of the school year to see if anything new has popped up somewhere."  No, they are going to look at the assignments on the day they missed, and when they see nothing, they will stop there.  Three weeks later, when the project I assigned on the day they missed is due and they haven't even started it, the first thing they'll ask me is, "When did you assign it?"

Without this feature I'm forced to use completely unnecessary and time-consuming workarounds, like all of those suggested above, like using a separate Excel sheet (then why even have the calendar?), sorting a different view on a different tab (again, why have the calendar?), sending out separate alerts and notifications when assignments are assigned (just what parents want, MORE email from school during the lockdown).  

Moreover, during this lockdown, many students around the country have extremely limited access to computers as well as a very short amount of computer time to complete the work, much less have to try and work backwards to find assignments.  Yes, due dates are important, yes we work by deadlines in the real world - but my students are children, not working adults.  They need relevant data at their fingertips in seconds, and if it's not there, they're lost and they either give up or come to me to have them explain the calendar to you.  With the sheer amount of grades I have to record as a high school teacher, assignment dates are every bit as important as due dates. 

PLEASE implement the common sense choice of allowing posting of assignments by ASSIGNMENT date as soon as possible.  Some suggestions on functionality:

1)  Best case scenario: Let instructors be able to drag and drop the calendar item to whatever day we want WITHOUT it automatically changing the due dates in the assignment.  Just make it like every other electronic calendar we humans use.  When I add something, let me choose a start time/date and an end/time date, and show it on the event.  Just let it be a free-floating, blank box where we can then link pages, assignments, modules, documents, videos, whatever.  I can do this in Google Calendar and pretty much every other electronic calendar I've used.

2) Right now, when you hover over a calendar event, the tooltip that appears shows three things:

      a) A time, without any indication as to what that time signifies;

      b) The title of the calendar event, which is redundant as it's literally on the event right next to the tooltip; and

      c) The course the calendar event is for (also redundant, at least for the teacher). 

At the very least, this tooltip can say "Due 4/26/20 @ 11:59 PM" rather than just "11:59 PM", but adding "Assigned 4/20/20" along with the due date and time would be even better.

3) Let instructors sort calendar items by either date assigned or due date.

calendar use calendar  assignment what students can see‌ dates‌ calendar due dates‌ tooltip‌ calendar detail‌lockdown covid covid19 covid-19 coronavirus distance learning‌

[dniemeyer1]

This is definitely a feature that has hurt many of our students-especially if they are absent and the work assigned that day isn't due until another day. They look at the date they missed, see nothing, and think nothing is due. It would be nice to have assignments listed on the date they are assigned as well as appearing on the date they are due.

[Qamzyah]

It would be nice to have the option in Canvas Calendar to show the entire range of when each assignment is available.  Right now it only shows assignments on the due date. It isn't until you go into the assignment itself that you can see the availability of the assignment. This is a major problem for me and others like me, as I don't feel the pressure to complete an assignment until I see it on the calendar.

Student.

[gnoack]

One solution a local k-12 school has implemented is to have a page that is updated weekly or even daily with what students have been learning, what is assigned, what they should be working on, and what is due.  This could be linked on the home page for parents and students to access. 

As a former elementary teacher, I used to have something like this written on my whiteboard that I updated each day/week. 

[MrLunetta]

I agree that dates assigned are needed by some teachers. A "Show date assigned" checkbox and associated calendar picker would suffice for me.

In the meantime, my workaround will be a daily event:

In-Class:

• 20 Questions - Identify Zeros

At-Home:

• Khan Academy -  Zeros of polynomial functions
• Are You Ready? I can find the zeros of a polynomial function (due Wednesday, 12/09)