By Staff Writer: Madison Lawson
Being a college student is highly stressful and can become very overwhelming quickly. For students here at ENMU, we have the Canvas student portal to help manage the chaos of classes. The portal’s calendar automatically organizes class assignments by due date. This is helpful, but only if the professor labels all graded work under “assignments.” Some professors require weekly or daily online graded discussions, which are not in the assignments category.
Since discussions are not in the assignments category, they commonly do not appear on the calendar in the Canvas student portal. This is a problem for any graded course work, such as some homework assignments, or optional assignments that can be extra credit, to be missed because it is not labeled “assignments” and will not be on the calendar.
A solution to this problem is the ability to add personalized assignments on any day of the week when someone is accessing the portal on a laptop or from the portal app on their phone. A student can add a title, the class the course work is for, the due date, and a brief description of what is being scheduled.
This feature requires a little bit more work from the student but can drastically help them stay organized and help students not have late assignments or discussions. This feature can be an excellent tool for first year and all students because the system provides a type of structure that the student builds. This can make the experience more personal and possibly help the student maintain focus while creating better time management skills.
Another solution is to use the syllabus from each class and correlate the dates on the syllabus with those on your calendar. Depending on how organized a person wants to be, this can be extensive or the bare minimum. The title of the assignment, the due date, and how many days in advance one will be notified before the scheduled day. This is a tedious way of organizing assignments but can be the most reliable reminder of what needs to be done daily. I use this feature for most of my assignments that I need to pay more attention to, such as an article or a quiz that I need to study for.
With a regular calendar on a phone or laptop, settings can be made to notify a day or more before the day of the scheduled assignment. This is an exceptionally helpful feature that is not available through the Canvas student app. Using the scheduling tools in both the Canvas student portal calendar and a regular calendar can help organize the daily workload of being a full time or part time college student.
Hopefully these tips can help some students manage their time better and minimize the stress of keeping up with due dates on everything!