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 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 also upload course and group events, such as for field trips and presentations. Each user will see a combined view of all their calendar entries within their My 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 Moodle calendar can be accessed by clicking on the month within the Calendar block, or clicking Go to calendar... / New event... at the bottom of the Upcoming events block.

To subscribe to a new ical feed

1. Navigate to your Moodle course.
2. Make sure the Calendar block has been added to the left or right column of your course home page. If it's not already there, review how to add 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. Fill in the fields under Import calendar...
   
   1. Enter a name for the calendar - e.g. ECON1001
   2. Import from: Calendar URL
   3. 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)
   4. Paste in the URL to the calendar - see below for options.
   5. Choose the type of event: Course for course wide event, Group for group events 
   6. If you have chosen a group event, choose the group these events apply to. E.g. ECON1001 Tutorial group A
6. Click Add.
7. 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 it completely

1. Navigate to your Moodle course.
2. Make sure the calendar block has been added to the left or right column of your course home page. If it's not already there, see how to add the Calendar block here.
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 module timetables in the UCL Common Timetable system

You now have the ability to subscribe to module 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 module cohort;
• or particular module 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 module codes you are working with. These should be in the Moodle course shortname, fullname, or otherwise in Portico.

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

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

http://timetable.ucl.ac.uk/ics/module/ECON1001

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

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

http://timetable.ucl.ac.uk/ics/module/ECON1001+ECON1005

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 module (such as lectures and practicals that everyone undertakes) - e.g. no module subgroup events like smaller group practicals are included:

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

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

Module subgroup events

Only those events for students in the module 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/module/ECON1001(TUTA)

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

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

 http://timetable.ucl.ac.uk/ics/module/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 module 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/module/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 moodledocs.

Further information

Terminology

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