M42 - Calendar

Keywords: calendar, entry, reminder, events, times, deadlines, due dates, activities, lectures, tutorials, classes, class, seminar, subscribe, ical, Outlook calendar, smartphone, Google calendar

What is it?

The Moodle Calendar is a block that can display the location, site, course, group, or individual user events. It is also able to automatically draw in scheduled dates, times and deadlines from activities like the Assignment and Quiz.

Why use it?

Staff can upload course and group events, such as field trips and presentations. Each user will see a combined view of all their calendar entries within their Moodle Home page. This shows all the events across all the Moodle courses a user is enrolled on. Lectures and tutorials can either be added manually to the Moodle calendar, or imported via the UCL Common Timetable ical feed.

Who can use it?

• Tutors
• Groups
• Individual students

Before I start...

- None at this time.

How do I use the Moodle calendar?

The full Moodle Calendar can be accessed in two ways:

1. Click the calendar icon at the top of your Moodle Home page to open the Calendar block, then click the Full calendar link within.
2. Click Go to calendar... within the Upcoming events block.

To subscribe to a new ical feed

1. Navigate to your Moodle course.
2. Click the calendar icon at the top of your course to open the Calendar block.
3. Click Import or export calendars within the block.
4. Click the Import calendar button, then complete the fields as follows:
   
   1. Calendar name: e.g. ECON1001
   2. Import from: Calendar URL
   3. Calendar URL
   4. Update interval: Weekly, or if really necessary daily (more frequently than that and the processes begin to bloat the Moodle logs - you can always update it manually if you need to)
   5. Type of event: User, group or course 
   6. If you have chosen a group event, choose the group these events apply to. E.g. ECON1001 Tutorial group A
5. Click Import calendar.
6. Moodle will tell you how many events it has imported. Events will be updated automatically on a weekly basis from then on.

To manually update an existing ical feed and bring in changed events, or remove them completely

1. Navigate to your Moodle course.
2. Click the calendar icon at the top of your course to open the Calendar block.
3. On the Calendar Block, click the month to access the calendar.
4. Click the Manage subscriptions button below the calendar displayed in the main area of the page.
5. To the right of each calendar feed you will see an update button, which will save any changes you make to the update frequency and will also check the feed and bring in any new events.
6. To the right of each calendar feed you will see a remove button. Click this to remove the feed from your Moodle course. Note: it will not prompt you to confirm removal, so be careful clicking this.

Note: If you need to alter the URL you will need to remove the old entry and create a new one, as only the update frequency can be changed after creation.

Subscribing to course timetables in the UCL Common Timetable system

You now have the ability to subscribe to course timetables in the UCL Common Timetable via the iCalendar feed. This is supported by Portico Services (timetable-help@ucl.ac.uk ).

You can subscribe to:

• all events - including any events that a subset of students take;
• only those events that apply to the entire course cohort;
• or particular course subgroups (which might be shown to groups of students in Moodle).

The URL pattern (for the UAT system) is as follows. ECON1001 and ECON1002 are used as examples below. Please substitute these example codes with the course codes you are working with. These should be in the Moodle course shortname, fullname, or otherwise in Portico.

ALL events in a single course (lectures and practicals/seminars/etc...):

Events might include full class lectures, as well as any course subgroup activities, such as practicals and seminars that only a subgroup of the students attend.

ALL events in multiple courses (lectures and practicals/seminars/etc...):

Events might include full class lectures, as well as any course subgroup activities, such as practicals and seminars that only a subgroup of the students attend.

It gets a little more complicated if you want to limit the feed to just a subset of the events. You add each subset - be it full cohort events (which are indicated with a hyphen) or subgroups - by surrounding the subgroup names with brackets

Full class events in a single course (such as lectures and practicals that everyone undertakes) - e.g. no course subgroup events like smaller group practicals are included:

Only those events that all students in the course undertake appear using this format.

 http://timetable.ucl.ac.uk/ics/course/ECON1001(-)

Course subgroup events

Only those events for students in the course subgroup (in brackets). It is most likely you will want to only show these events to a corresponding Moodle group, by choosing Group from the Type of event menu and choosing the relevant group from the Group event list. If these groups don't yet exist please see  M13 - Groups and groupings  to find out how to set them up. The groups need to exist before you add the calendar events for these groups.

http://timetable.ucl.ac.uk/ics/course/ECON1001(TUTA)

A mixture of full class events (e.g. lectures) and the (particular course subgroup) events (PRAC1& PRAC2):

You can mix and match the above formats to show a mixture of full class activities and subgroup activities.

 http://timetable.ucl.ac.uk/ics/course/ECON1001(-)(PRAC1)(PRAC2)+ECON1002(-)

Note: A link generator to simplify the generation of these URLs is in development and will be available shortly...

For testing purposes only add -uat after timetable to the above URLs.

Caution

For Timetable data checking (such as to check which subgroups your course has set up in CMIS) you can access UCL's Timetable support system.

To view the ical data file in a web browser and see all the events in plain text the URL is:

http://timetable.ucl.ac.uk/ics/course/ECON1001/format/text

Examples and case studies

In the UCL Engineering Faculty, the Integrated Engineering Programme students requested that all their offline deadlines be uploaded in to the Moodle calendar, so they may see all of this together with online activities (which automatically appear in their calendars) on their Moodle My home page. Some students choose to export this and display it in their Outlook or google calendars.

Questions & Answers

Calendar FAQs are available on Moodle Docs.

Further information

Terminology

Course subgroups - CMIS term for groups of students within a course who undertake particular seminars as a sub-group of the wider course cohort.