An assignment is in the course. It is not on your calendar. Almost every case has one of six causes, and they are not equally likely. Work through them in this 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 sidebar shows a short list a few days out and leaves plenty of real work off it by design, so a thing missing from To Do is not yet evidence of anything.
1. The assignment has no due date
This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and it is not something you can fix.
Canvas places items on the calendar by their due date. An assignment created without one has nothing to be placed by, so it does not appear on the Calendar page, it does not appear in List View, it does not appear in To Do, and it is not in any calendar feed you have subscribed 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 column 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". The fix is not technical. Open the course Syllabus page, which lists assignments with and without dates, and skim Modules, which is where instructors put things that are sequenced rather than scheduled. Anything you find there that matters, put on your own calendar by hand.
2. The course is unchecked on the Calendar page
On the left of the Canvas Calendar page is your course list, each 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 more than you would think, usually by a click aimed at something else, and the setting sticks between visits. Check that every course you are enrolled in is both listed and ticked.
Two related traps:
- Canvas limits the Calendar page to ten calendars at once. If you are enrolled in many courses, or in courses with several sections, some will be switched off and you will not be told why. Untick something you do not need to make room.
- A course you have not opened in a long time can drop off your dashboard, and its work disappears from To Do with it. The Calendar page's own list is the more reliable check.
3. The assignment is not published
Instructors build assignments before they release them. An unpublished assignment is fully visible to the person who made it, including on their calendar, and completely invisible to students.
This is the case that produces 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 what is happening, 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 has not been published yet, or whose term has not started, will not put anything on your calendar even though you are enrolled.
4. You are looking at the wrong date
Worth thirty seconds before escalating. An assignment due at 11:59pm on the last day of a month is easy to look for in the following month. A due date in a different time zone than the one your Canvas profile is set to can also land a late-night deadline on the neighbouring day.
Check your time zone under Account, then Settings in Canvas. If it does not match where you are, every midnight deadline in your term is drawn a day off.
The quickest way past all of this is List View, the button in the top right of the Calendar page. It replaces the month grid with a plain agenda of everything upcoming in date order, so an item hiding one row outside the visible month is in the list.
5. A section or group override applies to someone else
Instructors can assign the same work to different sections with different due dates, or to a single 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 in the course shows who each date applies to, under the due date, in the form "for Section B" or "for everyone else".
6. You are looking at a subscribed feed, not at 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, usually about once a day, and there is no setting anywhere that makes it fetch sooner.
That produces a specific, harmless version of this problem: an assignment posted this morning is correctly in Canvas and correctly absent from your phone until the next refresh. It also produces a less harmless version, where someone downloaded a .ics file once instead of subscribing to a URL, so the calendar is a snapshot that stopped updating the day it was made. The difference between the two, and how to set up the live version, is in Canvas to Google Calendar, step by step.
Always confirm against the Canvas Calendar page itself before concluding that something is missing.
When it is none of these
If you have been through all six, a short message to your instructor is the right next step, and it is much more effective with specifics: name the assignment, say that it is not appearing on your calendar or in List View, and ask whether it has a due date set and whether it is published. Those are the two things they can check in about ten seconds, and one of them is nearly always the answer.
Two things worth doing regardless of 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 the undated work lives, and undated work is the work that is easiest to lose.
- Keep your own list. Anything you find that Canvas cannot show, write down somewhere that does not depend on an instructor having set a field.
That habit is most of what this product exists to remove. Scholarwire reads your Canvas courses through a browser extension, keeps everything in one place, and flags the items that have no date rather than dropping them silently, so the work you cannot see on a Canvas calendar is still in front of you. If that is the problem you keep having, start free and connect Canvas once. The next step after that is usually turning the list into a week, which is how to turn Canvas assignments into a weekly study schedule.