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
RobDitto
Community Champion

Deactivated user, at our institution, the calendar limit is very much a problem for students.  Our MBA courses typically meet for a quarter (half a semester).  Many students take ten or more of these each term; with the personal calendar selected by default, there's always at least one course forced off in the selector.  And forget about the associated group calendars! 

Also, we use Scheduler heavily.  Students can't easily reserve appointments when the corresponding course calendar (or group calendar, for group appointments) is forced off due to the limit.  Agreed with others who point out that certain courses suffer disproportionately because of alphabetical order; ditto (ha!) for group calendars.

Placing quarter-length courses in special terms, or using override dates, isn't a practical workaround for the calendar limit.  For example, there's often early preparation or late submission/grading; full term-length access meets faculty and student expectations better.  I sometimes have to discourage co-curricular programs from using long-running courses or override dates because of the calendar limit.

hallmans
Community Contributor

Allison, I second everything that Rob has mentioned in his reply. We have the exact same set up with 7 week modules instead of semesters. we are constantly running into problems with courses being bumped off the calendar view. Even if there were a hierarchy where the last courses created would take precedence in the calendar view, that would be helpful.

A typical scenario is term one ends and a week later the second term begins. The instructors want the term one courses active to continue to make announcements and to return grades and papers. When we do that, a random term two course will disappear to make room for that term one course.

We have had numerous cases of students missing class session and deliverables because they weren't  showing on the current calendar. @RobDitto ​

RobDitto
Community Champion

 @mark_wittervan , yes, using terms will be a good solution for what you described. Read the video and links at What is a Term?.  Each term can automatically conclude each course in a way that lets students retain access, but not submit any new work. Courses concluded by term dates move out of the Calendar automatically and move to the All Courses part of the Courses menu in Global Navigation.  By using different access dates for teachers and students, you can give teachers advance access to work on course content or extra time to submit final grades.

allison
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

This is an idea I am tucking away for discussion with the team when we are able to prioritize Calendar work. Please keep the conversation going. It's clear that the Calendar is a key source of productivity and organization for many of our users and I definitely don't want to lose sight of that.

eaugustine
Community Novice

I have recently started up with Canvas for our School. I went through the various comments related to this and I strongly believe it's necessary to have more than 10 active Courses to be visible in the Calendar. As the School's Technical Admin and IT I believe this could be useful for school that students have more than 10 courses. In our Case we have from 13-15 courses and parents have been inquiring about not being able to see all the Calendar events.

I contacted my Canvas contact and he suggested to add my 2 cents to this thread. As a programmer it would be suitable to manage this situation at the admin level in which Account Admins can set a calendar limit (a variable) instead of a constant number across all canvas deployments. That we it can be adapted to each institution without affecting those who don't need more than 10.

In addition we have extra-curricular courses which would be great to add to the calendar without affecting the core group of courses and for this we need to have 10+ calendar visibility enabled.

 @jill_weddle ​ commented a similar situation we have and to be honest in our institution some parents are not tech savvy; which means adding it on to a Calendar freed or using iCal or anything similar is a "NO-NO".

Also an interest in  @ngee ​'s idea has grown to be a great solution to this situation.

Eduardo Augustine

sadenniston
Community Contributor

This got 280 votes. I'm unsure as to why the rationale for it even needs to be discussed. Only 10 calendars showing at any one time makes the calendar useless for students who are enrolled in more than 10 courses (all the students at our institution). The "uncluttered" calendar view argument doesn't hold any weight - a calendar isn't meant to be neat and tidy.

The API only returns events from 10 calendars, so it is clearly a limitation with Canvas.

This should be fixed asap.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team
  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...
scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

November 2016 update from  @scottdennis ​

Currently, we limit calendars displayed in Canvas to no more than ten courses or groups to optimize system performance.  We totally understand that toggling calendars on and off in order to check more than ten calendars works for most users but isn’t convenient in all use cases. For now this is the recommended practice. 

If you represent an institution that has a very pressing need to allow some users to display more than ten calendars concurrently, please discuss it with your customer success manager. 

Because we will not be working on this area of the product in the near future, we are moving it out of Product Radar and into Archived status.  When we do work on this product area next we will bring it back out and consider it along with other related ideas and suggestions

GideonWilliams
Community Champion

Very frustrating. My school based on UK model, has a minimum of 14 classes from ages 11 - 14 and at least 11 from ages 15-16. Will talk with my CSM but its not helping our wholesale move to digital homework diary or easy access to calendars :O(

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

 @GideonWilliams ​

We also appreciate your submission of

This is a great alternative suggestion for exploring this problem.

GideonWilliams
Community Champion

Many thanks. I need to say that thanks to the awesome wizardry of Michael Kop in our IT support team we may well have solved the problem. Not quite sure how (some very clever coding methinks) but we now have an extra link on our course navigation menu that directly opens the calendar.

Perhaps I should share the code or how it was done to support others?

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hey Gideon,

By all means, please do share if you can.

Also just FYI; we also reached out to your CSM this morning/afternoon about the calendar limit issue.  You should be getting a ping directly.

GideonWilliams
Community Champion

Our amazing IT guys have put in some javascript code that adds a link at the bottom of the course navigation menu that shows just the calendar for the course. Here it is kindly made available by Michael Kop who says it is kind of quick and dirty but does the job:

You can edit the link text on the first line, and more importantly it will automatically pick up on the current tenant (url)...

var LinkText = "Check Homework"; //Edit between quotes to change the link text

var cururl = location.href;

if (cururl.indexOf("/courses/") >= 0)

{

var CanvasTenant = window.location.host.split('.')[0]

var courseid = cururl.split('/')[4];

var newsechtml = "<li class='section'><a href='https://" + CanvasTenant + ".instructure.com/calendar?include_contexts=course_" + courseid + "' class='settings' style='font-weight:bold;' tabindex='0'>" + LinkText + "</a></li>";

$('#section-tabs').append(newsechtml);

}

Hope this helps..

candrew
Community Participant

Hello everyone, one of the specific use cases along side this is that some faculty members want to see a fully integrated calendar including all of the group sub-calendars for a course.  Could this be possible/allowed?

See idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8651-allow-instructors-to-see-all-group-calendars-for-course 

Chris

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

 

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.

thompsli
Community Champion

With the new version of Appointments replacing the old Scheduler, this is a much larger hassle for me now. The new version of Appointments only lets me offer appointment times to classes currently displayed on my calendar, and I'm pretty sure the old version didn't care and would let me select from the entire pile of courses.

I teach 7 different "real" classes, one "credit recovery" class, advise the drama club, and have a "homeroom" class. That's 10 Canvas calendars right there (assuming some sort of course or group is used for the drama club - we're still figuring that part out), leaving me no room to have my personal user calendar displayed as well, nor any theoretical group calendars I might have. I may not need the information on some of those course/club calendars as much as I need the information on my personal calendar, but I would need for students to be able to make appointments with me regardless of which of my classes they were in, so I'd be stuck with those particular calendars turned on since I'm making a new appointment group every week. (And if I end up in charge of an additional club, everything explodes and I can't even allow all students to book appointments since I'd be up to 11 items needing appointment-booking options...which I guess is a good argument for not advising any more clubs this year. "Canvas won't let me run more than one club. Technical reasons.")

RobDitto
Community Champion

 @thompsli , I have a few workarounds to suggest:

  • When you need to set up appointment groups for courses you want to keep unselected, use Settings > Course Calendar. This will take you to a Calendar URL which pre-selects that course, e.g.:

https://<institution_domain>/calendar?include_contexts=course_<unselectedcourse>#view_name=month&view_start=2018-09-14

  • The Syllabus tab will have a backlink to any appointment group.
  • It also works to bookmark the Group Details URL for an appointment group.
thompsli
Community Champion

Hmm...interesting. I didn't know about the syllabus page appointment group link since I don't think I've looked at the syllabus page in years (we all keep them turned off at my school as part of our school Canvas course setup guidelines), and I hadn't realized that when you were given the within-course course calendar with just that course on it like that that it only temporarily suppressed the other courses selected by default rather than overriding your previous selections generally. Good finds!

Unfortunately, what I use the appointment groups for is for students to make individual appointments with me during my on-site hours, so what I'm actually needing is to be able to put all 10+ courses where I have students who may need to meet with me for some reason that week into the same appointment group so they draw from a common pool of available appointments and I don't get double-booked or have lots of needlessly empty appointment slots reserved for only some classes. Thus, I need to be able to select all of the courses at once for the same appointment group rather than "cut one course from the herd" like I would if I were using them for something course-specific.

GideonWilliams
Community Champion

I have to say that by switching to the List View option in Dashboard this does alleviate much of the issues with limited calendar display (for students that is).

Students have responded very positively to this change

Speaking for a school where one year alone has 20 subject based courses, I was more aware of the pain than many!

bethanybutterfi
Community Novice

I'm a parent who oversees four different students. I can't see everyone's courses at once. This is problematic because assignments can easily be missed. I need to either be able to see all assignments on the calendar at once or at least be able to quickly group calendars together so I can click through students instead of individual courses. I've used several other learning systems that allow this function, so I know it's easily fixable.