[Scheduler] - Edit Appointments / Sign ups

Our instructors would like to be able to edit appointments in the scheduler instead of having to delete and recreate them.  If a student has already signed up for an appointment and it has been modified, it should notify the student and request an approval for the new time.

 

Instructors would also like to edit the sign up list.  They want to be able to add or remove course participants from the appointment.

 

There are a number of situations in which this capability would be useful.

- An instructor that has accidentally created a number of appointments and needs to change them.

- A group reschedules with the instructor, it would be easier to just modify the appointment than create a new one and have them sign up again.

- A student cancels an appointment but doesn't remove themselves from the calendar.

- The instructor needs to assign students to an appointment block. (Maybe they didn't sign up yet, but the instructor wants to lock them in)

Added to Theme

58 Comments
thompsli
Community Champion

I will note that if you limit students to only one appointment slot, it will only work for one Test Student slot per class. (I use Scheduler for weekly office hours with a single pool of appointments shared between 8 different classes, so I don't run into this in practice because I have yet to have a week with more than 8 slots that I needed to block off after the fact, but it does have limits. Fortunately, Test Students in different classes seem to be treated as different "people" rather than the same student in terms of calendar sign-ups.)

I assume it would also remove the appointment if you reset your test student, but I haven't actually tested that.

thompsli
Community Champion

 @strusse ‌, this solves very little of your actual problem (which I definitely see as a good use case for why instructors should be able to sign students  up for appointments), but you don't have to log out of Canvas for your students to log in.

You can use a feature that is called something like "incognito window" in Chrome or "private window" in Firefox to open a new "sandboxed" window in your browser and have students log-in to Canvas that window, which will not have your cookies and thus won't be logged into Canvas as you. They'll still need to log into Canvas themselves, so there are some steps there, but it saves a few steps from your existing process.

I use this a lot at the beginning of the year to help parents get Observer accounts set up.

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.

kraimont
Community Participant

In my K-12 sytem, we would like to schedule parent-teacher conferences. Could the scheduling feature be added to permissions so that Observers could make appointments? 

RobDitto
Community Champion

 @kraimont  users with non-Student roles currently can't reserve appointments. You may be interested in the current version of the feature idea about that:

60640769
Community Novice
julia4
Community Explorer

We are using a single appointment group for our learners to register their place at workshops. We have just had one of the workshops shift by 30 mins and now need to delete this (despite many learners being registered already) to set up a new appointment group which represents the correct time. We definitely need functionality to edit the time for situations such as this.

joe_greene
Community Participant

What's worse is there's no notification to instructors if students cancel or try to change things in appointments. This is a feature that existed in Sakai, that currently exists in Blackboard, but 4 years after being brought up to Canvas they still haven't fixed it on their end.

There needs to be an overhaul of the calendar/scheduler as it's okay but lacks necessary elements that should have been put in place years ago.

thompsli
Community Champion

I get emails when students make or cancel appointments. It's one of the notification settings.

It'll say something like:

(Student name) canceled his/her reservation for One-on-One help with Ms. Thompson.

Appointment Details:

Date/Time:

Oct 30 at 2:30pm

Attendee:

(Student name)

Course:

Computer Game Design 1 S1, Algebra 1 S1, Geometry S1, Algebra II S1, Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications S1, Math 8 S1, Homeroom, Math 7 S1

Available time slots:

12

Reason for canceling

none given

I wish it would specify which class the student was in, and use a more inclusive pronoun option than his/her, but it does exist. (I ended up leaving my notification settings very "chatty" and filtering it all to a folder in my email since there are so many things that Canvas will only communicate as notification emails.)

thompsli
Community Champion

Of course, they can cancel right up until the start of the appointment, so if I'm not obsessively checking my email I won't know they cancelled, but that's another issue. (I open a tab with my Canvas calendar in it at the start of the day, but it doesn't auto-refresh as students make same-day appointments so I'm often caught off guard.)