Recurring Activity Option for Calendar

[CommunityTeam]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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

The calendar application is great! When I learned about it, it made it much easier to view all of my upcoming assignments. As part of my assignment for the calendar tutorial I had to add events.

I found it a bit time consuming to enter the same event on multiple days. I think it would be more efficient if there was a "recurring" option when entering events. Also if the calendar was able to link to Google's calendar that would be ideal too!

Given that many of today's smartphones are equipped with Google it would be easy to view our canvas calendar events on our google events all at once.

Just some ideas Thanks!

  Comments from Instructure...

"Batch Event Creator" has been released in Canvas Beta Release Notes (2015-09-08)

October 2015 Update

Thank you to everyone that provided feedback to assist us in processing this idea.  The consensus is that the "Recurring Events" feature meets a majority of needs (40%-meets my needs, 60%-partially meets my needs, 0%-does not meet my needs).

We are going to mark this feature as complete.  If you are seeking additional advancements to the calendar, please begin by searching the Canvas Feature Ideas for ideas that have already been submitted.  Don't see what you are looking for?  New ideas can be submitted via a new feature idea.

[cohenf]

This option is not available at my institution for some reason and, so, I'm lost on how this marked "complete."  All software calendars I use (gmail, yahoo mail, Outlook, mobile phones) have this option. Is this still in beta and, therefore, not enabled for all client institutions? When I click "more options" in Scheduler, there is no "repeat" option. I checked with Canvas online customer support and they verified that the option is not available at my institution. I always post my office hours on the LMS using this function. I'm not really eager to do it 90 times (6 different day-hours for 15 weeks) for each of my classes. Also, for recurring, you should be able to click on each day of the week (e.g., M, W and Th), not just be restricted to weekly, daily, monthly. Maybe Canvas offers this, but I can't tell. Thank you.

[kona]

 @cohenf ​, this is marked complete because the functionality does exist in Canvas. We have it turned on at our institution. Yet, not every school has decided to turn on this feature even though they could if they want. My recommendation is to contact Canvas Support or the Canvas Admins at your institution to see if they'll turn this feature on at your school.

[cohenf]

Thank you. I'll do that. I still don't understand why such a basic calendar feature needs to be "turned on."

[kona]

Not sure, but I guess some institutions weren't ready to have this functionality available at their institution. Maybe the Canvas Admins at your Institution could shed some light on why they didn't turned it on.

[cohenf]

 @kona , I contacted our instructional technologist, who is our Canvas administrator. Here is what he said after I screenshotted this exchange along with a request for him to turn on "recurring" feature.

Thanks for the additional info.  Using it I was able to find the production release notes (9-19-2015) that clarified: "This feature must be enabled by a Customer Success Manager at the account level before it can be used for individual courses. . . . While there are certain features that I can turn on & turn off at the admin level, this (bizarrely) goes one step above my head, to the CSM folks at Instructure! I've sent the request along to Matt -- our primary CSM -- so he should see it tomorrow."

I'd like to suggest permitting our internal, campus, Canvas administrators have discretion over the use of this feature.

[kona]

Well that solves the mystery and I'm glad you'll be getting access to this option soon. As to why some ideas need to be enabled by a CSM, the only reason I can think of is that some features can have unintended consequences (ex: faculty journal). In this case I'm not sure why it needs turned on by a CSM.

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, Frank,

As Kona mentioned, unintended consequences. The recurring calendar feature is great at creating recurring events, but that's all it does. Let's say you want to create 10 events. The 10 events will be created, but after that they are treated as individual events; you cannot edit one and have the change apply to all the others, because they are not associated with each other. Some instructors at some institutions have been frustrated that they have to change all events individually after they are created. So admins have to know about this functionality before turning it on, which is why they have to contact their CSM first. I do know that our product managers want to improve on this behavior and are trying to work on it in a future release.

As an admin, you can always find out what features are available and how to enable them in this lesson: What feature options are currently available at the account level?​

Thanks,

Erin

[cohenf]

Wow, erinhallmark​. Thank you for that helpful information. Yes, now I can see the concern with giving local admins this discretion at this time. I am very glad you told me that the recurring entries are non-editable in the aggregate. That will certainly make me more careful when I create them. Hopefully, the "want to improve" will lead to eventual improvement. Thank you.

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to rlk03 for submitting this idea, as well as, ggd356​, krowan​,  @mlattke ​,  @ejackson ​, 70364085​,  @ewakeman ​,  @kona ​,  @BradMoser ​,  @Beth_Young ​,  @ccalderon ​, sandy.stevenson​,  @stelpstra ​,  @RobDitto ​,  @vkg ​, &  @cohenf  for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas!

[michael_mcgarr1]

This is fantastic for creating recurring events, but it'd be even better if this same ability existed within the scheduler. Putting in recurring office hour events, for example, is great, but not as useful when the events can't be reserved or booked by students.