Put everything with a deadline into the to-do list

[Beth_Young]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote May 5th, 2015 - August 5th, 2015  Learn more about voting...

No matter how many ways I try to direct them otherwise, students start with the "to do" list and don't look at anything else, not the Calendar, not the Syllabus, not the Assignments page. Then they miss deadlines because some types of assignments never appear on the to-do list. Please put everything that has a deadline into the to-do list: reading assignment, practice quiz, homework to be submitted offline, etc.

I tried adding reminders to the things that do show up in the to-do list--for example, in quiz instructions, I said something like, "Remember to read X, do practice quiz Y, do textbook activity Z before you take this quiz." Some students were angry because there were "hidden" assignments inside quizzes. Well, the assignments were not hidden from anyplace . . . EXCEPT from the "to do" list. At the beginning of this semester, I spent a great deal of time personally contacting students who were failing to do assignments, and every single one of them told me "It wasn't on the to-do list so I didn't know I was supposed to do it."

An incomplete list causes more problems than it solves.

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-10-29)

[Beth_Young]

Thank you for your suggestion. Actually, the syllabus causes me no agony or extra work. Canvas makes the page and puts all the assignments on it, with their due dates, automatically. I just make it my homepage. Posting an outline of my syllabus would cause more work because I'd have to make the outline.

No matter what I do with the rest of the course, there's no way to turn off the To Do list.

As long as that list remains misleading and incomplete, it will cause problems.

[peytoncraighill]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

There's a lot to look into here, so let me do some digging, workshop it with the team and I'll reply with an update.

[kmeeusen]

Beth:

Check out the discussions ​, Canvas Release Notes​ for the most recent release.

[peytoncraighill]

We're planning on additional research in 2016 on improving productivity for Canvas users, and this idea fits well within that category. There aren't plans to address this with new development in the next six months, so I'm archiving this idea. Feel free to continue the discussion, as this thread will be used for research in the future.

[allison]

Hello all,

I have an update on this request. We've just released a small change to our beta environment that hides the "View All Pages" button from the student view of any page in modules as long as the Pages course feature is inactive (hidden in the Course Navigation menu). This is a small change and does not completely remove the button; teachers will still be able to see it. I'll be curious, though, to see what impact this has on the student experience. Please keep us posted and let us know if this change minimized confusion for your students.

Happy Friday!

Allison

[ginan]

I was a bit confused by this comment so I did some testing in our production environment.

In courses where the Pages course feature is inactive (hidden in the Course Navigation menu), students can see the "View All Pages" button but then they just get the following error message.

I think it's a good idea to remove the button altogether if they don't have access to the page.

Will the button still appear in courses where the Pages course feature is active?

Thanks!

(By the way, is this comment about a different feature request?)

[grant_martin]

Thanks for the comments and follow ups Beth! I've been here a year and have been running into the same problems identified above with no elegant resolutions. This seems to useful and simple to implement - know what I mean?

[grant_martin]

Dittos here as well Susan!

[tvthomas]

Looking forward to seeing movement on this feature, which is sorely needed. Would also like to see it added to the Desktop browser version of Canvas—I only see this in mobile apps.

[jlg65]

 @peytoncraighill  This functionality is important to us and I would love to hear an update on the status. Everything with a due date posted on the syllabus, calendar, to-do list makes sense and would eliminate the added step of determining a work around with an assignment or event to get it there.