Finding missing and upcoming assignments in Canvas: a parent’s guide

Where the answers live

• Missing work: open a course, click Grades. Anything past due with no submission is tagged Missing in red. This is per-course — you have to walk each course.
• Upcoming work: each course's home page lists what's due soon, and the global Calendar overlays every course's due dates in one view — the closest thing Canvas gives you to “what's due this week, everywhere.”
• The student's To-Do list (Dashboard sidebar) shows what Canvas thinks still needs doing — but it's on the student's view, and it quietly drops items once they're submitted.

When “Missing” is lying to you

Canvas marks an assignment missing when its due date passed with no online submission. But plenty of real schoolwork never touches Canvas: worksheets handed in on paper, quizzes taken in class, labs checked off at the teacher's desk. If the teacher created those as Canvas assignments (to hold the grade) but collects them physically, they can sit “missing” in red until the teacher enters grades — sometimes for weeks.

So before anyone panics or gets grounded: ask what kind of assignment it was.“Missing” plus “we did that in class” usually just means the gradebook hasn't caught up.

The reverse trap: done work that still looks pending

The other direction fools people too. An assignment stays in Canvas's upcoming lists until its due datepasses — even if your kid already submitted it, even if it's already graded. A test taken and scored on Thursday can sit under “upcoming, due Friday” all week. Check the submission status or the grade column, not just the due-date list, before declaring something undone.

Multiply by every course and every kid

None of this is hard once — it's hard daily. A middle schooler has seven courses; checking Grades in each, plus the calendar, plus knowing which red “missing” labels are real, is a fifteen-minute audit per kid. That's the part worth automating.