Overdue offline assignments disappear from Canvas's to-do list
If a Canvas assignment is submitted on paper, through an external tool (which includes New Quizzes), or has no online submission at all, Canvas keeps it on your to-do list only while the due date is still in the future. The moment the deadline passes, it disappears from the list — whether you did the work or not.
What you see
An in-class presentation or a MyLab/WebAssign problem set drops off your to-do list right after the deadline. You never turned anything in, and Canvas acts like it's handled. There is no "missed" marker left behind on the list, and nothing distinguishes an item that left because you finished it from one that left because time ran out.
Why it happens
The to-do scope keeps an item if it is "submittable" online OR still due in the future. Canvas defines a list of offline submission types — on_paper, external_tool, none, not_graded, wiki_page, peer_review — that are excluded from "submittable." Offline type plus past due date equals gone, with no record in the feed that it was ever missed.
Two things follow from that. First, the assignments most likely to vanish are exactly the ones with no digital paper trail to remind you — presentations, in-class work, participation items, and anything graded inside a publisher's tool rather than in Canvas. Second, because external_tool is on the offline list, work delivered through a third-party tool behaves the same way even though it feels like an online submission.
What you can do about it
- Check the gradebook, not the to-do list, for missed offline work.
- Treat the tool's own list as the source of truth for external-tool courses. For MyLab, WebAssign, New Quizzes and similar, open the tool's assignment list directly and treat the Canvas feed as a preview at best.
- Use the Canvas calendar for anything with a date. Penn State's IT notice on incomplete to-do lists (query-map C2, evidence-tagged
[V]) directs students to the Calendar for exactly this reason. - Walk each course's Assignments page at the start of the week.
- Keep the syllabus in the loop. Anything an instructor never entered into Canvas was never in the feed to begin with.
Evidence
canvas-lms, app/models/user_learning_object_scopes.rb (master, retrieved July 2026):
assignments.submittable.or(assignments.where("submissions.cached_due_date > ?", Time.zone.now))canvas-lms, app/models/abstract_assignment.rb (master, retrieved July 2026):
OFFLINE_SUBMISSION_TYPES = %i[on_paper external_tool none not_graded wiki_page peer_review].freeze
scope :submittable, -> { where.not(submission_types: [nil, *OFFLINE_SUBMISSION_TYPES]) }An item qualifies for the to-do feed if it is submittable or still due in the future. Both arms were verified against live master on 2026-07-30.
This is why Margin does not treat an item vanishing from a feed as evidence it was submitted — absence is not completion, and closing a task requires a positive per-user signal.