Canvas Calendar Scheduler: An effective way to manage one-to-one meetings

Academics have numerous responsibilities that involve one-to-one and small-group meetings with students, including personal tutorials, orientation of first-year students, academic supervision, managing office hours, directing final year projects, master dissertations, and PhD theses, as well as team and project management. However, the organisation of such meetings can be sometimes challenging and time-consuming, especially with large numbers and limited timetabling space and scope. In addition, attempting to coordinate different schedules through endless email messages has proven to be both frustrating and inefficient.

With the use of technology, scheduling meetings has become easier and quicker. Scheduling applications, such as Doodle, Eventbrite, and MS Bookings, among many others, which allow for the creation and management of bookable time slots, can simplify the arrangement process and help to avoid conflicts of calendars. Some of these applications also allow for one-to-one as well as group coordination, sending messages and reminders, and they work bi-directionally with Google Calendar and Outlook.

We experimented with a plethora of different scheduling tools for the reservation of one-to-one meetings, and we evaluated/ranked them according to five specific criteria. These are: the cost of the application, the ease of setup and use, the customisable functionalities, the capability to limit bookings per slot and slots per user, the ability to integrate and synchronise with the University’s Outlook Calendar.

Although all the tools under study have facilitated the achievement of the initial goal, only one application managed to pass all five evaluation criteria, namely “Canvas Calendar Scheduler”. Therefore, we used this tool to manage all our one-to-one and small-group bookings in the current academic year, interacting with students from various programmes and on different levels of study. Feedback from students was gathered verbally and via an informal email survey. The outcome of our case study showed that the introduction of a Canvas-managed booking system has, among other things, improved staff-student communication, enhanced students’ sense of support and increased students’ turnout and engagement, as well as their overall satisfaction.