I figured out a solution. To start a scheduled task. just enable it and update it. The act of updating any scheduled task causes it to be queued to run imediately. However, you have to use the DNNScheduler object to do the update; SchedulingController also contains an update method but this just changes the task's properties and doesn't queue the task to run. SchedulingController sc = new SchedulingController(); ScheduleItem si = sc.GetSchedule(ScheduleItemName, ""); DNNScheduler ds = new DNNScheduler(); ds.UpdateSchedule(si);