Scheduling appointments to meet with individual students can now be managed through Canvas. This removes the frustrating administrative burden of managing multiple places (calendar, daily planner, email, hand-scribbled notes from class) where you track your student meetings to discuss that paper or project.

Canvas Scheduler
“Scheduler is a Calendar tool that creates appointment groups within a course or group. Students can sign up for a time slot within the appointment group. Some appointment time slots may only allow one student to sign up at a time, while others may allow an entire group to sign up. Only students can sign up for appointment slots in the Scheduler.” (Canvas Guides, 2017)

Getting Started
There are several steps to set up an “appointment block” (what Canvas calls the time/date range that you would like to have open for students to sign up for a meeting). In short, you will create a block of time (or multiple blocks on different days) and tell Canvas that you would like the block of time divided into equal chunks of 30mins (or 60mins… or 45mins, etc). Canvas will then automatically create open meeting slots of the appointed length on the day(s) that you have specified. Students can then sign up for the available spots.

You can follow step-by-step instructions here: How do I create an appointment group in the Scheduler?
https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-2640

You can also use the following video tutorial created by Stanford’s EdTech group.

Helping students

• Direct the students to your Canvas course page. From the home page, they should click “Calendar” in the navigation bar, click on the name of your course and then “Scheduler” in the top-right navigation.
• Humanities & Business Advisors are already using Canvas Scheduler, so it’s likely that your students are already (loosely) familiar with the process.
• If they need assistance to schedule, you can refer your students here for help: How do I sign up for an appointment using the Scheduler? https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-3652

Other Tools
These two options can sync with your Google calendar and display blocks of open times for students to register. The web site handles the reservation and saves the appointment into your calendar. These are third party tools, not officially sanctioned by the university (use at your own risk), but many folks use these services to save time scheduling meetings.

YouCanBookMe – https://youcanbook.me/
Assistant.to – https://www.assistant.to/