How are assignments meant to be seen by assigned/view date (for students)?

BJH
Community Member

I'm asking this question as a parent of an elementary school student who has to use Canvas.  Our school district has provided very little training to teachers and none at all to parents.

Please keep in mind that I have a 5 and 8 year old who are being tasked to use Canvas.  This experience would be completely different with a 15 year old.  As a parent of elementary school children we basically have to be their administrator/secretary to ensure that they are finding and completing everything required of them.  This is a substantial time-sink to the already greatly increased time we need to spend on ensuring they are getting an education.

One of the biggest challenges we have is locating all the assignments, meetings, etc for the half dozen courses that my daughter is enrolled in.  After spending some time in Canvas I discovered the "List" view in Dashboard.  This is from what I can tell the most powerful view in Canvas (second only to the Calendar's Agenda view) in that it seems to show all module assignments across courses as well as if assignments have been submitted or are missing/late.  Without this view we found ourselves constantly having to drill down into each course to see all assignments and then drilling down into each individual assignment to see if it was submitted.

However, even with this view the way that the assignments show up does not seem very conducive to scheduling.  I don't know if our teachers aren't using the tool properly, or if Canvas simply doesn't have this functionality.  This is best illustrated by example:

Say we have an assignment that is assigned today, Wednesday the 16th.  However it is not "Due" (or at least should not be considered missing/late until Monday the 21st.  When looking at the Dashboard List view this assignment doesn't appear to show up until Monday the 21st with a due date of 11:59PM.

This means that when trying to see a list of all assignments, we won't actually see assignments until their Due date and therefore have very little time to complete them.

Is there a way for a teacher to assign (and a parent to view) all assignments in a course (and indeed across all courses) so that they show up in a single global view?

Without this, using Canvas is a game of hide-and-seek/hunt-and-peck trying to scour out assignments.

I really hope we are missing something....

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