Appointments

This feature is part of Moodle Workplace™, which is available through Moodle Certified Partners and Service Providers only.

Overview

Appointments is an activity module for teachers to keep track of in-person activities. With the Appointments activity, the teacher is able to schedule sessions for the students to book/sign-up. Sessions can have multiple dates and times but within an Appointment activity the student will only be able to sign-up for one of that sessions.

Adding Appointments

To add a new Appointment activity, teacher must go to the course page, "Turn editing on" and use the "Add an activity or resource" link and pick "Appointments" from the activity chooser.

When adding a new Appointment, is enough to set only it's name and click "Save and display" to start creating the appointment sessions.

To add appointment sessions inside the activity, the teacher will use the "Add" menu, where it is possible to add a single assignment (with multiple dates and times) or multiple appointments in same day.

When adding a new appointment session, teacher will have to set a capacity for that session, optionally enable the "waitlist" feature, allow or disallow cancellations of booking by students, and also set a location and a description for that session.

It is possible to add a session without any date and time. In this case the date and time well be displayed as "not set" in the sessions list.

Sessions support custom fields, that may be setup at system level (going to Site administration > Plugins > Activities > Appointments > Appointments custom fields) and that will be available to all sessions. Although the custom fields are setup at system level, each session will have it's own values for those fields. Only fields with values set will be displayed on "details" of the session.

When adding multiple appointments, teacher will define "Timeframes" to set how sessions will be created. In this case, each timeframe has a Date option, a start and an end time, and the option to automatically split sessions within the start and end time (for example, create multiple sessions with 15 minutes each) and also to select a "Break time" that is the time between the sessions (for example, have 5 minutes between each session). To create sessions in different days, the teacher is able to add more timeframes when adding multiple appointments.

It is not possible to have appointment sessions with multiple times/dates when adding Multiple Appointments.

For example: if we choose to Add Multiple Appointments, and have one Timeframe with Start Date as 25, November, 2019, Start time 13:00, End Time 14:00, Automatic split 15 minutes and Break time 5 minutes, then 3 sessions will be created: the first starts at 13:00 and ends at 13:15; the second starts at 13:20 and ends at 13:35; and the last will start at 13:40 and end at 13:55.

Signing up to sessions

When a student access the course, he/she will see the number of available "seats" for that appointment on the course page.

Accessing the Appointment activity will display the list of available sessions and a button for sign-up. After the user has signed-up for a session, at the course page the number of available seats will be replace with the date of next session or, if this was not set, the user will just see the "Booked" status.

If the activity was configured to allow cancellations of bookings, the student can access the activity and cancel the booking for the session (optionally giving a reason for the cancellation) and select another session if available.

The teacher is able to add and remove attendees for sessions as well as overbook (add more attendees than the configured capacity).