Scheduler module

The Scheduler module helps you to schedule one-on-one appointments with all your students. You specify the periods during which you are available to see the students and the length of each appointment. The students then book themselves into one of the available timeslots. The module also lets you record the attendance and grade the appointment.

Quick Start for the Moodle Scheduler

This lesson shows you how to quickly make your first Moodle scheduler, so only the basics are described. Like any other first attempt, your first Moodle scheduler will probably be more for learning than using, but after you finished it, you’ll be able to choose which features you want to learn more about.

Prerequisites

• You must have teacher access to a Moodle course.
• Teachers and students must be enrolled in the course.
• The Moodle scheduler must be installed, since it is not part of the core Moodle package.

Creating A Basic Scheduler

1. Click the "Turn editing on" button.
2. Click the link "Add an activity or resource."
3. In the box that appears, choose "Scheduler" and click the "Add" button.
   
4. A web page will appear called "Adding a new Scheduler." Type in the name of the scheduler, which can be changed later.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the webpage and click the "Save and display" button.
6. A webpage will appear with the name of your scheduler at the top. Click the "Add slots" link.
   
7. A drop-down menu will appear that allows you to add repeated slots or a single slot. Click the link to add repeated slots.
8. Options will appear to add time slots. For this lesson, the slots you add can be real or fictitious, for practice. All time slots must occur in the future, and the start time must be before the end time. The simplest option is to:
   1. Click the "Start time" menu and choose a time that is one hour from now.
   2. Click the "End time" menu and choose a time that is one hour after the start time.
9. Scroll to the bottom of the webpage and click "Save changes."

 
After these steps, a basic scheduler will appear. To learn more, view the scheduler as a student or explore the options below.

Scheduler Options

Screens

• Teacher screens
  • My appointments
  • All Appointments
  • Adding a slot or a series of slots
  • Scheduling a student or a group of students
  • Adding a student to the slot when scheduling
  • Overview (release 1.9 added)
  • Statistics
  • Exports
  • View student
    • View of comments
    • View of appointments and grades

• Student screens
  • Appoint

Features and Defines

Scheduling Modes

The Scheduler module allows two behaviours relative to appointing, depending on configuration settings. When set to "one only", a student can propose a unique appointment. When set to "one at a time", the student may propose one appointment, and will have to wait to be seen, before being able to make a subsequent appointment.

Slots exclusivity

A slot may accept an unlimited number of students (say, when scheduling for open meetings), or only one (face-to-face meeting), or may be set to accept a predefined number of students.

Volatile slots

A slot may be volatile. If so, it will be deleted from slot list when released by a student or revoked by a teacher.

Moodle Module standard implementations

Settings

• Scheduler Module settings

Capabilities

• Scheduler Module capabilities

Backup/Restore

The module performs complete backup/restore within the course context. Slots are considered as module scope information, while appointments are considered as user related data.

Additional implementations

Notifications

A notification service (by mail) sends messages to teachers and students about any unilateral change to the agreed appointment.

Behaviour with groups

The Scheduler Module uses the standard grouping mode of Moodle to enable or disable features related to groups scheduling. When the group mode of the module is set to "NO GROUPS", all group related adds-on are hidden. When set to "GROUPS VISIBLE" or "SEPARATE GROUPS", all group related features are enabled. For group features to be usable, students in the current course should of course be grouped (obvious).

• Teacher side group features
  • A teacher can schedule on a group basis rather than on a per student basis. When scheduling a full group, the exclusivity status of the time slot changes to fit the group size. The appointment of the group locks definitively the time slot for that group. Notifications are handled individually, just as if each student had made the appointment.

• Student side group features
  • A student can schedule an appointment for one of the groups he belongs to. When choosing this option, he will make the appointment for all colleagues in the group, locking the slot exclusively at that number of users. In order for a student to schedule a group, he will have to belong to at least one group in the course. In the special case where he belongs to several groups and he wishes to make an appointment within a group, he will not be able to make the appointment until he has been seen (one-at-a-time setting) or at all (only-one-time setting).

Links

• Scheduler module forum
• Plug-in database entry for Scheduler module