Hi @bruni,
Just wanted to share some thoughts as a Canvas Admin for a higher-ed institution on your frustrations, both for you and other potential readers of this thread...
I think at the core, the issue is really who does (and/or should) have control of various elements in the LMS. As I see it, there are three main groups (students, faculty/teachers, and administrators) and some others you may or may not have at your institution (instructional designers, teacher assistants, librarians, etc). In my opinion, Instructure has a very hard job to balance the needs of all of these different groups, who have different needs and are sometimes in direct conflict with each other.
The calendar is probably a very good example of this balancing act. From a teachers perspective, you'd probably like to be able to control (almost) everything about your course in the LMS. That seems reasonable, as you're probably the main contact students have for the course. From a student perspective, they would really like as much consistency as possible among their courses. It can be a very confusing experience for students when their courses all work very differently, so as much as I also like option switches for things, they don't always make sense, especially at a course level. From an institutional admin perspective, we usually try to look at both sides and sometimes have to choose one, which can be very hard... Instructure is in a similar position, but instead of just looking at one institution's users, they have to consider things globally.
Historically, it seems that Instructure has been the most student-centric LMS of the major players. They've designed Canvas so that it's hopefully easy for the student to find what they need to do without hunting around, and at the same time it's hopefully not too hard for instructors to set things up. Now sometimes the functionality you're looking for might not be there or may work differently that you'd like, both of which are super frustrating.
Back to the calendar in particular... Almost everything there (and the related to-do lists and syllabus) are populated based on due dates entered for assignments, quizzes, discussions (and optionally dates for pages). You can add additional items to the calendar as well, but not really remove the auto-populated items. This is usually helpful for students so that they can see their upcoming assignments across many classes, get alerts from the mobile app, etc... I know a lot of faculty want students going into their course instead of directly going to a specific assignment through the calendar or to-do list, but from what we hear from our students, they just don't operate in that way anymore (sigh). I have a feeling that if the calendar and/or to-do list population was a course option, it would make some teachers happy, but probably have a lot of negative consequences for students.
I know this is a bit of a lengthy post, but I want to close in again saying I do share your frustrations that many things in Canvas don't work as I'd prefer either. I think perhaps having an institutional opt-out for the calendar could work (so it wasn't available in Canvas at all, and students would not be relying on it for any information), but with the above considerations in mind, I think it would be very problematic as a course-level option. There are other considerations with options like this, such as documentation becoming more complex as users have to be told they may or may not see certain things, but I didn't want to even go down that road yet...
Maybe this sheds some new light on things, or maybe you'll just be in total disagreement, but that's okay too! If we all agreed on everything, there probably wouldn't be as much need for this great community to exist.
-Chris
