This content was published: April 16, 2018. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Creating a calendar feed from your course in D2L
Posted by Peter Seaman
Did you know you can create a calendar feed from your course in D2L? You can direct D2L to “push” events from a course into a calendar that you, or your students, already use, such as Google Calendar. It can be a nice way of seeing how assignments, quizzes, and other online course activities fit into the rest of your life.
How to create a calendar feed in D2L
I’ve not seen many instructors create a calendar feed in D2L, but it can be done, though it’s not obvious.
- Click on Calendar, either on the navbar or on the Calendar widget on the course homepage, or go to Course Admin > Calendar.
- Click on Settings button in the upper right-hand corner. In the middle of the page that comes up, you have to check the box next to “Enable Calendar Feeds and then click the Save button.
- The next step is confusing, because nothing happens when you click “Save” – you are taken back to the Calendar page. You have to know to click on the “Subscribe” link. The box that pops up when you click “Subscribe” is the key to happiness.
- Here you can get a feed from all of your classes, or just one class, by clicking on the “down” arrow at the top, and you can then copy the URL onto your clipboard and add the calendar to your Google calendar or whatever other calendaring tool you use. Setting up the feed in your calendaring tool (such as Google Calendar) is beyond the scope of this blog post, but if you would like to try it with your Google Calendar, you can follow these directions, but be sure to read the section Add using a link.
My sense is that while a calendar feed would be useful to you, it could be even more useful to your students – allowing them to see assignments from all of their classes in a calendaring tool they are already using. You might want to recommend it to your students, and remember they can always contact the excellent student help desk if they need assistance in adding the calendar feed.
Great post! I was wanting find out how to get a calendar feed for my class due dates – so timely!
Will students follow these directions too, or is this just for the teacher view in D2L?
The student help desk has also created a set of instructions for students for how to add a calendar feed. It had previously only been in the Online Student Resource Center.