CEETE at UW-Madison
Collaboratory for Engineering Education and Teaching Excellence

Using Canvas Calendar Appointments for Office Hours and Exams

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Setting up a system for students to sign up for makeup exams can seem very arbitrary, with no direct integration in Canvas. While most may end up using some sort of form, or direct emailing, there is a way to use the Canvas appointment system to easily setup appointments for office hours or exams.

Watch our video guide on Kaltura

Setup

  1. Go to your Canvas calendar (not course calendar)
  2. Click the Create a New Event button, indicated by the + symbol
  3. Select the “Appointment Group” tab. 
    1. Fill in Name,  Location, and select the date and time range for your exam (either your set exam time, or whole time frame students can come in)
    2. Either set a number (the maximum capacity for your room), or unselect the “Limit participants to attend” checkbox.
    3. I think is less about room capacity and more about how many slots each student should sign up for.
    4. Click Select Calendars and select the course(s) for which this exam make-up is for.
    5. Click Publish

Sharing with students

Students can see the event in their calendar tab, but to make it easier, you can link the calendar in the Canvas course.

  1. Linking the appointment (only do this if you have a small number of alternates)
    1. In your calendar, you can click (left click) the appointment, and it will open this pop-up window
    2. Right click link, and save link address.
    3. You can paste this link, along with the any other make-up time slots you may have, in a Canvas page.
  2. Using the find appointment button
    • This is a much simpler way, but you will need to explain this to the students, as it is up to them to find it in their calendar.
    • The student will also click the calendar button, like you did
    • There will be a “Find Appointment” button (you will likely not see this in your account, as there has to be an active appointment you can enroll in for the button to be visible)
    • From there, the students can choose the course, and relevant appointments for that class, in this case your midterm slots, will appear

Options

If you are allowing students to sign up for anytime in an interval to take the exam, follow these additional steps:

  • Use the “divide into equal slots” sections to allow students to select a specific time within the whole time frame.
  • You may want to enable “limit participants” if you do this

Students can also sign up in groups. While this may be helpful if you want to conduct group appointment, this feature is very glitchy, and we do not recommend you use it.

Considerations

  • Ensure the location will have enough space for students that sign up for same time slot
  • Links posted on a Canvas page or announcement will break when the course is exported. Essentially, you would need to set this up for every semester again.
  • If a time slot has a limit of 1 participant, when one student signs up for it, other students will no longer see that time slot as an option