Show more classes in Calendar

(7)
This request is to allow additional classes to be shown in the calendar view. Right now, with a cap of only 10, it is not possible to have the calendar show all classes from all terms. Our terms are consecutive (for example, a term ends at the end of September, with a new term starting at the beginning of October). For faculty and students to have a complete picture of the schedule from one week to the next, they need to ability to view at least 14-16 courses on the calendar at a time. This is also useful when building the course calendar, so that there is not a constant need to change which courses are selected to be visible. Having this option will not increase clutter for anyone (because they can choose to select only the number of calendars they want to see), and will greatly increase usability for those who need to see additional calendars.
66 Comments
ana_mataksiviou
Community Novice

We're getting a lot of complaints from our students about this limitation of the calendar. 

studentsupport1
Community Novice

The maximum number of calendars available is not enough to accomodate the increasing number of calendars we need as administrators of Canvas.  Each course module needs to have its own calendar as this is visible to the students enrolled in those modules.  We record all calendar events by module and need to view them all simultaneously.  We currently have 16 modules but are only able to view 15 calendars, this number will be increasing as new courses are added,  resulting in the need to view more calendars.  A minimum of 20 should be available.

timothy_maw
Community Champion

The cap limit for this is now extremely problematic for us. With our competency-based model, we have our instructors teaching far more than 10 courses at once but they can't use the scheduler for more than 10 courses. This is making it much harder to use the calendar effectively thus making it hard to schedule time with students. This feels like another one of those things that as an arbitrary cap and has been asked for for some time. Instructure, please stop with some of these caps.

lincolngroveaca
Community Novice

How is this even still an issue 5 years later when this is literally as simple as changing one line of SQL code to remove the max? Making the app less usable for all these teachers, students, and parents for a fix that takes less than 10 minutes. Most people may not need more than 10 calendars, but for those of that do this affects functionality a great deal. If you really insist on a cap, raise it to 20 and that would at least satisfy everyone that has commented on this thread. 

thompsli
Community Champion

I assume it's a performance issue given how slowly my calendar loads with 10 classes now. I don't know how the information the calendar needs is stored and what kind of queries they're running to retrieve it, but they probably need to re-think that backend process before they can raise or eliminate the cap.

They still need to do that, both because it's unacceptably slow now and because 10 calendars is not enough for a lot of use cases, but it's not as simple as just changing 10 to 20 and calling it a day. It's particularly frustrating because there's no way to do things like appointment slots by section or list of specific students, so if I need to offer additional appointment times to a select group of students, an entire additional class has to get created for that and we run into the calendar limit problem instead.

RobDitto
Community Champion

Just a reminder that there is a way for institutions, through their Customer Success Manager, to request an increase to the 10-calendar limit for their Canvas instance.  While it's possible, but it can exacerbate the sort of slowness  @thompsli ‌ describes.

timothy_maw
Community Champion

We did request an increase from our CSM last week and apparently it couldn't be done. It was frustrating.

GideonWilliams
Community Champion

We had ours increased  @timothy_maw ‌ although this was nearly 3 years ago. We did for the needs of our students more than our staff. The Calendar limit was not fit for purpose for UK schools curriculum with some students being taught 15+ different subjects in some cases.

For us, much of this has been mitigated with the move to the List View as a Dashboard view - as we use the Calendar for homework tasks.

As I have said with regard to other instances, it is important that Canvas is flexible in its approach. One size fits all needs to be one size fits each.

Offer more options....

timothy_maw
Community Champion

Well, maybe we should ask again but still I have to agree with you. We are a competency-based institution so our instructors could be teaching sometimes 20 classes concurrently. Students are all over the place and even within the same course aren't in the same spot. We need things to be more flexible at times but Canvas does not always offer that.

RobDitto
Community Champion

 @timothy_maw ‌, definitely ask again and suggest the CSM contact me through the Community or in Salesforce. I can provide them with what I know about the history of the offering, some of which is here:

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Just FYI; I asked Tim's CSM to reach out last Friday.

netparent
Community Member

Observers definitely need to be able to see more than ten calendars.  I only have two students, one in middle and one just starting high school.  Together they have 14 classes.  If I am logged on via webpage, I cannot toggle between students.  If I am logged into the app, I must toggle between students.  I would like to choice to either toggle or not on both platforms though I know that is not the topic at hand.

How can I properly manage what they are doing, if I can't see it all the calendars at one time?  Or if I can't see it by student? I know that the goal is to get them to manage their work all on their own.  That's the goal, but we are not there yet, and I need a way to monitor what has and hasn't been done without pulling my hair out.  Also if I can see what has been submitted would help too.  I know I need to go find that topic to comment on as well.

The point of having the observer is so that I can monitor what needs to be done.  Right now, I really can't.

amyschrenk
Community Member

I'm an observer for my 2 children.  They each have 7 or 8 classes.  So that's 15 or 16 courses.  I need to be able to see all of both children's assignments.  Limiting to 10 limits that if you have a parent who is observing more than one child.

audra_agnelly
Community Champion

I'm sure I've commented on this before but just pressing the use case for K-12. Our ES students have one course per subject area... that 4 core content + health + 5 related arts. They have a grade level team page, a whole-school page. Students who receive services may have additional courses from their provider(s), and we have GT enrichment courses. We didn't leverage all these spaces before moving virtual, but now we are and I'm worried students will miss virtual meetings that are scheduled on the calendar. Importing the ical feed into a google calendar is not an option for a 2nd grader. Oh, and then there's the parents who have more than one student in the system. Is it really that hard to program default to 10 calendars but remove the max or at least increase it? This whole thread demonstrates clear use cases for why this feature is need and has been requested for the past 5 years. I know the crowding is a concern but switching to week view improves that experience.

MariyaT
Community Member

So this has been requested since 2015, and no reaction from developers. Maybe they will finally raise the limit to at least 30 courses now that we really depend on online education.

Right now we just subscribed to the calendar feed in our Google calendars and can see all events (though marked with one color only) in there. Did the same for each of the kids.

jlange3
Community Member

I have 2 students, one in 6th and one in 10th.  We NEED to be able to see all of the courses.  Between them, there are 17 classes and I would like to be able to see them all on the calendar.  Ideally I would love to be able to switch between my kids, so I can see a calendar for each person.  Same with the dashboard - it is difficult to navigate with 17 classes on the dashboard.  If it could be divided up that would be nice.

esok
Community Member

As a parent of 4 children in 3 different schools, this feature is *****ESSENTIAL******. Currently there is no way to see everyone's schedule. I can't even figure out how to just see one child's schedule since the names of the calendars do not include my children's names. Frustrated and angry. I have 25 courses to manage for my children.

phenomenalwoman
Community Member

As a parent with three students in three different schools, it is imperative to be able to see more than 10 classes at a time.  They have 21 classes all together! 

In addition, if the assignment strikeout feature could be integrated to the observer calendar, then the calendar would be top notch for me.  As it is now, I have to have my students show me their calendars to check that all assignments have been submitted timely.  

Like many of the other parents, these features would be an incredible upgrade or addition to the platform.

Cmcclintock
Community Member

I have 3 children that I am trying to observe and being able to only view 10 classes is not viable, since just one kid has 11 classes.  This is not a good way to have parents the observing their children's assignments if they have to continually toggle back and forth between different classes.

christie1
Community Member

Limiting what courses I can view and constantly changing when I click anything over 10 renders the calendar useless to me.