Almost every missing assignment has one of six causes, and the most common by far is that it has no due date: Canvas places work on the calendar by due date, so undated work never appears there. After that, check for an unchecked course, an unpublished assignment, the wrong month or time zone, a section override, and a calendar feed that has not refreshed. Work through them in that order and you will usually find it in under two minutes.
Check the Canvas Calendar page itself, not the Dashboard. The Dashboard's To Do list shows a short list a few days out and leaves plenty of real work off it by design, so something missing from To Do is not yet evidence of anything.
Does the assignment have a due date?
This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and it is not something you can fix.
An assignment created without a due date has nothing to be placed by. It does not appear on the Calendar page, in the Agenda view, in To Do, or in any calendar feed you subscribe to. It is not hidden. It has no date attached.
To check: open the course, go to Assignments and find the item. If the date beside it is blank, that is your answer.
Plenty of real work is set up this way on purpose: readings, optional practice, "bring a draft to class". Open the course Syllabus page, which lists assignments with and without dates, and skim Modules, where instructors put work that is sequenced rather than scheduled. Anything you find there that matters, put on your own calendar by hand.
That is the gap Scholarwire for Canvas is built around: it keeps Canvas assignments with no due date under an Undated filter on each course's Assignments tab instead of dropping them. You can start free now; connecting Canvas takes the Chrome extension.
Is the course unchecked on the Calendar page?
Beside the Canvas calendar is your course list, each course with a colored box. A checked box shows that course. An unchecked one hides it completely, and a hidden course looks identical to a course with nothing due.
These get unchecked by accident, usually by a click aimed at something else, and the choice sticks between visits. Check that every course you are enrolled in is listed and ticked.
One related trap: Canvas selects only the first ten course and group calendars by default. If you are in more than ten, counting groups and extra sections, some start unticked and Canvas does not say why. Untick something you do not need to make room.
Is the assignment published yet?
Instructors build assignments before they release them. An unpublished assignment is visible to the person who made it, including on their calendar, and invisible to students.
This is the case behind the strangest conversations, because your instructor can be looking straight at it while you cannot see it at all. If a classmate also cannot see it, this is very likely the cause, and a one line message to the instructor fixes it faster than anything else on this page.
The same applies to a whole course: a course that is not published yet, or whose term has not started, puts nothing on your calendar even though you are enrolled.
Are you looking at the wrong date?
Worth thirty seconds before you escalate. An assignment due at 11:59pm on the last day of a month is easy to look for in the following month. A time zone in your Canvas profile that does not match where you are can also land a late-night deadline on the neighbouring day.
Check your time zone under Account, then Settings in Canvas. If it is wrong, every midnight deadline in your term is drawn a day off.
The quickest way past all of this is the Agenda view, one of the view buttons at the top of the Calendar page. It replaces the month grid with a plain list of everything upcoming in date order, so an item hiding just outside the visible month is in the list.
Is the due date for a different section?
Instructors can give the same work to different sections with different due dates, or to one group, or to one student. When they do, Canvas shows each person only their own version.
So a date a classmate reads out is not necessarily your date, and an assignment a classmate has may not be assigned to you. The assignment page shows who each date applies to, under the due date, in the form "for Section B" or "for everyone else".
Are you looking at a calendar feed instead of Canvas?
If you added your Canvas calendar to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, you are not looking at Canvas. You are looking at that app's copy of a feed it fetches on its own schedule, often hours apart.
That produces a harmless version of this problem: an assignment posted this morning is correctly in Canvas and correctly absent from your phone until the next refresh. Canvas To Do items never reach the feed at all. It also produces a less harmless version, where someone downloaded a .ics file once instead of subscribing to the link, so the calendar is a snapshot that stopped updating the day it was made. How to set up the live version is in how to add Canvas to Google Calendar.
Always confirm against the Canvas Calendar page before concluding that something is missing.
What if none of these is the cause?
Send your instructor a short message with specifics: name the assignment, say it is not on your calendar or in the Agenda view, and ask whether it has a due date and whether it is published. They can check both in about ten seconds, and one of them is nearly always the answer.
Two habits are worth keeping whatever the outcome:
- Do not rely on a calendar to tell you what exists. Once a week, open each course's Assignments page and its Syllabus page. That is where undated work lives, and undated work is the easiest to lose.
- Keep your own list. Anything Canvas cannot show, write down somewhere that does not depend on an instructor having set a field.
Once everything is on one list, the next step is turning it into a week, which is how to turn Canvas assignments into a weekly study schedule.