How to get Canvas assignment reminders on your iPhone

Canvas sends plenty of notifications, but they arrive when a teacher posts or grades something, not when you need to start. The Canvas calendar already knows every due date, though, and it will share all of them through one private link called the Calendar Feed. Canvas, made by Instructure, is the learning platform at most US colleges and a lot of high schools.

Step 1: Find your Canvas calendar link

1. Open Canvas in a web browser and go to Calendar (in the left-hand menu).
2. Click Calendar Feed, at the bottom of the right-hand column.
3. Copy the link in the box that opens.

The link looks something like https://yourschool.instructure.com/feeds/calendars/user_…ics. It’s private to you: anyone who has it can read your calendar, so don’t post it or share it.

Step 2: Get a reminder before every due date

1. Get Nudge from the App Store. It’s free.
2. Pick Canvas from the list of school platforms. (Later on, it’s under Settings › School calendar, or tap “Paste my calendar link” on Home.)
3. Paste the link. Your dated work appears in one list, sorted by due date, and Pip starts watching.

You choose how early Pip speaks up: 1 day and 2 hours before a deadline, or 1 day, 3 hours and 1 hour before. Deadlines due together share one nudge, and nothing arrives overnight. Nudge rechecks your link whenever you open it or pull down to refresh, and if a teacher moves a date, it tells you what changed.

What comes through from Canvas

Assignments, quizzes and graded discussions that have a due date, plus calendar events, from every course you’re enrolled in. Assignments without a due date and anything your teacher hasn’t published yet won’t be in it. Calendar feeds share due dates, not grades or whether you’ve submitted, so mark work done in Nudge after you hand it in. For anything that isn’t in the feed, type it into Nudge like a text: “essay draft thursday 9am”.

Other ways to see Canvas due dates on your iPhone

The same link works in any calendar app that can subscribe to a calendar. That’s a good way to see your due dates, but it isn’t built to remind you of them:

• Apple Calendar: in the Calendar app, tap Calendars, then Add Calendar › Add Subscription Calendar, and paste the link. Subscribed calendars are read-only, so you can’t add your own alert to each assignment, and school feeds usually don’t include alerts of their own.
• Google Calendar: on a computer, click + next to Other calendars › From URL. Google checks subscribed links on its own schedule, so new or moved due dates can take many hours to appear.

Nudge reads the link for one job: deadlines. It lists them by due date, counts down to the next one, nudges you before each, flags anything that moved, and lets you mark work done.

Troubleshooting

I can’t find Calendar Feed.

Make sure you’re on the main Calendar page from the left-hand menu, not a course page, and that you’re in a browser rather than the Canvas Student app. The button sits at the very bottom of the right column, under the list of calendars.

Nudge says the link doesn’t work.

Copy the link from the Calendar Feed box, not the address bar. It should start with https:// and contain /feeds/calendars/.

An assignment I submitted is still there.

The Canvas feed shares due dates, not whether you’ve turned something in. Mark it done in Nudge after you submit.

Questions

Still stuck? Email [email protected] and say which platform you use, but please don’t send the link itself. See also: what a school calendar feed is and how to keep it private.

Canvas is a trademark of its owner. Nudge is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Canvas; it reads the standard calendar link Canvas gives you.