[ARCHIVED] Online reservation tool for Canvas support sessions?

[anthonem]

Our institutional calendaring tool doesn't provide faculty the ability to make reservations online for our Canvas workshops and consultations. I've been doing some research into free/cheap tools in the world, but I'm not all that impressed. So far is seems like Reservio could work. Does anyone have experience with this and (hopefully) any other online reservation tools?

[awilliams]

Hey  @anthonem ​, have you considered using the Canvas Scheduler?​ It would require that you create a course for your faculty and get them enrolled into it as students, but then you could use the scheduler in that course to set up workshop slots etc and allow faculty to sign up for them.

[anthonem]

Good point awilliams​ I think that could provide us the functionality we need..but I'd have to think about it some more. I think we're reluctant to go down the path of adding faculty to a Canvas course for support options because we don't have an automated way to adding accounts to a site based on role (i.e.: faculty) and we're not enabling self registration on Canvas courses in our instance. Thanks for your response!

About 30 minutes after I posted this I ran into this system using Google Apps: Event registration tool - Google Apps Script Examples  -- so far this is looking very promising!

[anthonem]

Update -- a colleague in my department just started testing this tool -- Tockify | Modern Attractive Website Calendars

So, far this one is looking pretty great! Will report out our findings.

[anthonem · Accepted solution]

Final update...we went with Tockify, which embed beautifully into our website. We really wanted something that looks nice. Tockify is lacking in that it doesn't have a reporting dashboard, and it doesn't send automatic emails to faculty signing up for workshops. Thank goodness we have an administrative assistant that can take care of all that workflow. We found someone using Google apps that would have satisfied our needs: Event registration tool - Google Apps Script Examples  -- but Google calendars don't look very nice embedded into a website. 

We also chose Acuity Scheduling to handle our consultations signup -- they require more functionality than merely reserving a spot at workshops (for which Tockify works well) such as the automatic email reminders and the ability for faculty to "un-reserve" their spot by clicking a link in the email that Acuity Scheduling automatically sends out.

Thanks awilliams for your reply -- I think the Canvas scheduler would actually work well for institutions that load all their faculty into a course site.