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.

[ccalderon]

Yay!!! - Thank you! Can't wait to play with it!

[Renee_Carney]

The new Canvas Beta Release Notes (2015-07-06) are out and this is featured!

[ejackson]

VERY happy about this! :smileygrin:

[peytoncraighill]

We discovered a bug with this feature before releasing to production and reverted the change until it has been addressed. Updates to come!

[Beth_Young]

I am SO looking forward to this feature. I'm entering my fall office hours in the calendar now, and it is taking a ridiculously long time. I have office hours only two days/week, but that means 2 days * 15 weeks * 3 classes = 90 separate events to enter. The calendar doesn't remember the settings from my previous entry, so I need to specify them every single time. And if I forget to select the class from the pull-down list, the event defaults to my personal calendar where my students can't see it, which means I need to delete it and enter it all over again . . . aargh. I really feel for people who have more days and more classes to enter.

I know Canvas folks are working on the recurring event option, so next semester will be much better, hooray! In the meantime, I'm hoping these related feature ideas get more votes:

" modifiedtitle="true" title="Create a single course calendar entry across multiple classes

[Edit to add: I just discovered that if I "select" the calendar I'm working on by turning off all other calendars in the display, that calendar is automatically selected when I create an event, which makes this process a lot easier! But I'm still looking forward to the recurring event option.]

[Edit to add: Also, I only need to enter these events for one class, not three, because once they are entered into the calendar for one class, I can just import them into the other two classes. 30 events to enter is way better than 90!]

[peytoncraighill]

Quick update:

We weren't able to tackle the fix for this feature as soon as we were hoping (despite the "pressing" tag attached to it), but the good news is, as I write, an engineer is working on it! For some, this fix comes a little late for the start of the year, but for others, hopefully we're able to squeeze some extra goodness into fall start.

For clarification, here's what you can expect from the initial implementation of this feature:

Think of this as a batch event creator. Once the events are created, they are completely independent of each other. So no batch editing, and no batch deleting. In other words, when you create a batch of 50 events, you end up with 50 independent events, not a series that can be modified or deleted. To modify or delete, you would need to modify or delete each individual event. This is rather limiting, so the game plan is to:

1. Put this behind a feature flag so that if it's doing more harm than good for an institution, the functionality can be removed.
2. Add batch deletion as the second order of business, after initial release.
3. Based on available development capacity and the feature's popularity, add batch editing.

[kona]

Thanks for the update  @peytoncraighill !

[sandy_stevenson]

LOVE the reoccurring events idea... definitely a huge plus for time savings.

[ejackson]

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to using the recurring events feature!!

[erinhmcmillan]

This feature was just added back into beta (with a few small changes) as noted in the release notes: Canvas Beta Release Notes (2015-09-08)​

Thanks,

Erin