Why your LMS calendar is missing assignments, and what to do

The calendar is not the course

Every LMS calendar, whether it's Avenue to Learn, Canvas, Quercus, onQ, LEARN or Moodle, shows exactly two kinds of thing: items the professor created inside the LMS with a due date attached, and events they typed into the calendar by hand. Nothing else.

That means a midterm announced only in the outline, a lab that runs every second week, a textbook opt-out deadline, and a group formation deadline are all invisible to it. So is anything a prof set up as a plain file or announcement.

How to find the gaps in ten minutes

Per course, put these side by side:

1. The grade breakdown table in the outline. Every row in it is a graded item that must appear somewhere on your calendar.
2. The week-by-week schedule at the back of the outline, which is where quizzes and in-class assessments usually hide.
3. The LMS calendar for that course.
4. Anything in the first two that isn't in the third is a gap. In most courses there are between three and ten.

Common reasons things vanish

1. The item exists but has no due date set, so it never lands on a day.
2. It's published to a section or group you're not in, or not published at all yet.
3. The prof uses a third-party system (MyLab, WileyPLUS, Achieve, Top Hat) whose deadlines never sync back.
4. It's an in-class thing, like a participation quiz, that the LMS has no record of.
5. Your calendar feed is filtered to one course, or the LMS calendar view has courses toggled off.

Fill the gaps once, properly

Add every missing item to the calendar you actually look at, with the weight in the title, and set a reminder a week ahead for anything over 10%. Subscribing to the LMS feed is still worth doing for the things professors do post, especially last-minute changes.

SyllaBuddy exists for exactly this gap: it reads the outline PDF for the full list, and can also pull your LMS feed in alongside so you see both sources merged, with duplicates collapsed.

Questions