Welcome back to Spring Semester 2026. I’m writing this as a first-person piece because, frankly, I think we all need a little more real human connection right now.
For those of you I haven’t met, my name is Kathy Hayes. I’ve been at Emory for over 30 years, and I’ve worked closely with instructional technology, faculty, and students since around the year 2000. What I want to share today comes directly out of years of conversations, consultations, trainings, and, most recently, student feedback about how Canvas course sites are organized.
I spend a lot of time talking with faculty about Canvas in trainings, one-on-one meetings, and informal conversations after class. Recently, I met with a faculty member who had done everything by the book. She had attended multiple Canvas workshops, completed an intensive multi-week course redesign, and brought years of thoughtful teaching experience to the table. And yet, she told me she still receives student feedback that her Canvas site is “confusing.”
Students we survey also say Canvas courses are confusing. Often, it comes down to a mismatch between how faculty think Canvas is organized and how Canvas actually works for students. Over time, I’ve come to believe that much of the frustration around Canvas comes from not fully understanding one simple rule: the structural spine of a Canvas course is the assignment.
Assignments are not just submissions. They are the students’ organization system.
In Canvas, assignments (including graded discussions and graded quizzes) do far more than collect student work. They quietly drive almost everything students rely on to organize their academic lives. When an assignment is published with a due date, Canvas automatically does several things:
- places it on the student’s calendar,
- adds it to their to-do list,
- displays it in the gradebook,
- includes it in the Canvas course summary and at the bottom of the Syllabus page, and
- triggers notifications.
No other tool in Canvas does all of that at once.
This is why students often say they “missed” something even when it existed somewhere in the course. If an activity lives only as a file, a page, or a verbal mention in class, and not as a properly set up assignment, it effectively does not exist in the student’s organizational system. From their perspective, Canvas is the schedule, the reminder system, and the grade tracker. Assignments are the mechanism that holds those pieces together.
The syllabus reflects assignments.
One of the most misunderstood features of Canvas is the Syllabus page. It is easy to think of it as just a place to upload a document, but in Canvas it also functions as a dynamic schedule generator. The list of dates students see under the syllabus is not something you manually build. It is pulled directly from assignment due dates.
This means that when assignments are missing due dates, unpublished, or inconsistently created, the syllabus schedule is out of sync with what students expect. From the faculty side, everything may feel “there.” From the student side, the roadmap looks incomplete or contradictory.
The diagram below shows how Canvas is structured behind the scenes and why assignments play such a central role in the student experience.
Once this structure is clear, it becomes much easier to manage student expectations for a Canvas course without adding unnecessary complexity. With that in mind, I’d like to share some practical tips for managing assignments in ways that support both you and your students.
Practical Tips for Managing Assignments
Create everything that is graded as an assignment, even participation. If it affects a student’s grade, it should exist as a Canvas assignment. This ensures it appears in the gradebook, allows students to see it reflected in their total grade, and keeps grading transparent. Common items that are often overlooked include participation, attendance, presentations, in-class quizzes, and lab work graded offline. Even if students never submit anything digitally, the assignment still does important structural work for you.
Always put a due date in the due date field, even if it is flexible. If flexibility matters, you can explain grace periods in the assignment description and adjust dates later using bulk editing or override dates. An empty due date field means no roadmap for students.
Publish assignments early. Availability is not the same as due dates. Publishing early allows students to plan their workload, reduces anxiety, and prevents “I didn’t know it existed” emails. If needed, you can control access using Available From dates.
Use Assignment Groups. Set up assignment groups that mirror your syllabus’s grading scheme, such as exams, homework, and participation. Activate weighting by assignment groups unless you use total point grading. This makes the total grade meaningful for students, clarifies weighting, and reduces repeated questions about grades.
Use Student View as a quick sanity check. Before the term starts, and again mid-semester, check Student View and ask yourself one question: “If I were a student, could I tell what is due this week in under 30 seconds?” If the answer is no, the issue is almost always unpublished assignments, missing due dates, or assignments that are not linked anywhere. Student view can be found on the top right of your course home page.
Use bulk date editing after copying a course. After copying a course, use bulk editing to adjust due dates instead of opening assignments one by one. This updates an entire semester in minutes, reduces errors, and encourages reuse rather than rebuilding.
If Canvas has ever felt overwhelming, start by checking your assignments. When assignments are accurate, published, and dated, Canvas does much of the organizational work for you. And when that structure is in place, everything else becomes easier for both you and your students. As always, our team is here to help. If you have questions about assignments or anything else on Canvas just make an appointment.
Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash