Our faculty wants a "major assignments" master calendar, in order to identify days on which too many teachers have scheduled major assignments before they impact students. In Moodle, students automatically see all the assignments in their courses. I want a way for each teacher to see a summary of major assignments schoolwide as they schedule their own. To complicate matters further, it would be most helpful for a teacher to automatically see what major assignments their students (not all students) have on a given day.
I am thinking about how to implement such a feature in Moodle. (I am an average programmer). Since we want to track only major assignments, we need to find a way to distinguish major from regular assignments. We also need to write a function to count major assignments for the given day only for students enrolled in the class.
Ideally, this counting function would fire as the teacher selects the assignment date. That way, the teacher could easily move the assignment from one day to another and see the impact on students' workloads.
In our school, it would be less work to create a new assignment type called "major assignment" than it would be to add a "major" checkbox to each assignment type. In our school, major assignments are not likely to be submitted electronically, and keeping the function in a separate module would avoid making changes to Moodle core code.
I could use your advice and feedback on this idea. Is anyone else working on a similar idea? Is there a better way to approach this task? Am I missing an existing feature in Moodle that could help me achieve this end?
Many thanks.
Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
Number of replies: 3Re: Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
Hi Richard:
We have implemented this at our school. We have teachers label assignments by putting them in bold (we have a patch that adds the <b> </b> tag to the title. We also have a simple block that looks for assignments that have this tag and counts the number of affected users. We have taken the extra step of having a user profile field that shows if they are in the class of 2007, etc.
It works nicely and has avoided many scheduling conflicts. While we are not prepared to put this in Contrib, hopefully the above ideas will get you started, and I can send you are code on an "as is" basis if you contact me.
--Gary
We have implemented this at our school. We have teachers label assignments by putting them in bold (we have a patch that adds the <b> </b> tag to the title. We also have a simple block that looks for assignments that have this tag and counts the number of affected users. We have taken the extra step of having a user profile field that shows if they are in the class of 2007, etc.
It works nicely and has avoided many scheduling conflicts. While we are not prepared to put this in Contrib, hopefully the above ideas will get you started, and I can send you are code on an "as is" basis if you contact me.
--Gary
Re: Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
I would love to see this. richard (at) kassblog.com. Thank you for sharing.
Richard
Richard
Re: Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
Richard - I had given thought to using the MRBS block for this. My idea was to treat each class (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) as a Room and call the Area "Major Assignments/Tests". A teacher could then go in and reserve a time period for that day indicating they are giving a major assignment or test on that day. If a teacher goes in and see that there are already three other teachers from different disciplines (math, science, language, etc.) giving a major assignment then they should reschedule their assignment to another day. Ultimately the school opted to continue using a paper calendar rather than implement this; however, we did use the MRBS block for scheduling computer labs. So while it is not the perfect solution it may be helpful. I would be curious if Gary's patches allowed for a Moodle quiz to be a major assessment (in other words does it check for the bold tag in all activity names or just the assignment type?). One of the nice things about the MRBS block approach is that students can also view the calendar and it can be set up so that only teachers can modify it. The down side from what you were describing is that it is much more of a manual process and requires that the teacher take the initiative to check and enter their test on the calendar. I suppose you could do some work to report back. I even wonder if it would be possible to implement a combination of Gary's approach with the MRBS block. The teacher enters an assignment in bold and then gets feedback about how many other major assignments/tests there are for that day. In any case, I hope some of these ideas might be helpful to you. Peace - Anthony