We're piloting Canvas with a small group of teachers, and one of the key questions that we're focused on these next couple of weeks is thinking through how we build our "Major Commitments" or testing calendar.
I've seen lots of solutions to this over the years -- a blotter calendar in the faculty workroom that you scrawl your test dates on to, a shared Google Calendar that everyone has to update, etc. In our current LMS (which we are definitely leaving), we are able to mark individual assignments as "Major Commitments" and then every teacher is able to pull a report that shows them which days students in their class already have prior major commitments (if you're the third major commitment of the day for a student, you have to reschedule).
We'd like to transfer some version of this functionality to Canvas. I saw the Important Dates in the Canvas Elementary documentation, and I'm wondering if there's a way of bringing that into the regular interface elegantly? (My assumption is that it's just a skin over Calendar Events, am I right?).
What are other people doing in this situation? Have we gone back to basics, or is there some elegant already-built workflow that I'm missing?
I am 100% chill with implementing our own LTI to do this (in fact, I have one on the back burner right now).
The obvious solution would be to submit major commitments as an external tool in this case, and use that to build the calendar. But… sometimes major commitments are things like papers, which we submit via Google Assignments, and with external tool submissions there can be… only one!
I see that I can place an LTI in many relevant places around assignments (weirdly, on assignment_view placement, it shows to students, but not teachers?). And another solution I've thought about is just using the assignment_edit placement to add a "Major Commitment" checkbox to the assignment creation process -- but my best guess at how to get _which_ assignment was created is to use the Live Events service, which feels like overkill.
