At our school, courses start all throughout the semester. While students can see calendars for courses that have not yet started by entering those individual courses, the global calendar to which they can subscribe will not populate sessions from that course until the day it begins. This leads to some nasty surprises, such as required sessions or assignments popping up 1-2 days before they happen. I would like to request a feature that allows institutions or instructors to make published courses visible in students’ global Canvas calendars before the course start date, without opening the full course for participation. At present, there appears to be a gap between: * allowing students to view a published future course before it starts, and * having that course’s calendar events populate the student’s global Canvas calendar and related subscribed calendar feed. A useful solution would be a course-level or institution-level setting such as: “Show published courses in student global calendars before course start date.” We are unable to solve this issue by simply changing the course start date, as doing so would lose synchronization with other software platforms. Creating a "shell" course with the same sessions as a workaround has been suggested, but is ultimately a silly and labor-intensive solution to this problem. Has anyone found a clean workaround for this, or would others also find this functionality useful?

Feature Request: Allow published future courses to appear on student global calendars before course start

At our school, courses start all throughout the semester. While students can see calendars for courses that have not yet started by entering those individual courses, the global calendar to which they can subscribe will not populate sessions from that course until the day it begins. This leads to some nasty surprises, such as required sessions or assignments popping up 1-2 days before they happen.

I would like to request a feature that allows institutions or instructors to make published courses visible in students’ global Canvas calendars before the course start date, without opening the full course for participation.

At present, there appears to be a gap between:

allowing students to view a published future course before it starts, and
having that course’s calendar events populate the student’s global Canvas calendar and related subscribed calendar feed.

A useful solution would be a course-level or institution-level setting such as:

“Show published courses in student global calendars before course start date.”

We are unable to solve this issue by simply changing the course start date, as doing so would lose synchronization with other software platforms. Creating a "shell" course with the same sessions as a workaround has been suggested, but is ultimately a silly and labor-intensive solution to this problem.

Has anyone found a clean workaround for this, or would others also find this functionality useful?

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Accepted answers

Jeff_F

@William_Fuller227 - Thanks - I get it now - there is a parity issue. Students can technically see the data, but Canvas chooses not to surface it in the one place students actually rely on for planning. See below for value added text for when you are ready to share your idea as a roadmap contribution. Canvas Collaborative Roadmap - Instructure Community

Possible student impact framing text:

From a student perspective, this behavior creates real planning and time management issues. Many of our students are working adults who rely on the Canvas Global Calendar and its subscribed calendar feed as their single source of truth for academic commitments across multiple courses. When required sessions or assignments from a published future course do not appear until the official start date, students may receive only a few days' notice for events that require schedule adjustments, time off work, or coordination with family responsibilities. Although the information technically exists inside the course, students reasonably expect that published course events will appear in the same centralized calendar view that aggregates all of their other academic obligations. This gap disproportionately impacts students juggling overlapping course timelines and undermines Canvas as a reliable planning tool.

Best, Jeff

All comments

Jeff_F

Hello @William_Fuller227 - we use the Participation set to course with start and end dates feature in the course settings. And with that we publish courses for students to have read only access several days ahead of the actual start date. But we could publish courses a week ahead of the start date, two weeks, etc. This has worked fine for +ten years.

From my current course - (note we tack on 90 days to the end date to account for incompletes, etc.) —

William_Fuller227

Thanks Jeff - we do this as well. Read only access definitely helps, as they can view that course's calendar. However our course structure is complicated: one January-February, another January-March, another February-April, etc., with some semester-long courses layered on top. With read only access the courses still don't populate the student calendar that shows all of their courses, which is the same one to which they can subscribe with third party apps.

Getting courses that are published but have not started onto that central, subscribable calendar is the functionality I'm missing.

Jeff_F

Possible student impact framing text:

Best, Jeff

William_Fuller227

Thanks Jeff, will add to the roadmap.

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