Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by cwadmin 1 -
Number of replies: 16

Hello,

We've been having trouble with new course-level events not showing in the site calendar for admins, despite the "Admins see all" option being turned on:

This was working in the past, and we can still see pre-existing events in the admin site calendar, but newly created calendar events are not showing.

Summary

  • Pre-existing course events show for tutors/students and for site admins in both course and site calendar
  • New Events show for tutors/students in course and site calendar.
  • New Events show when admins view the course calendar.
  • But, new Events aren't showing in the site calendar for site admins.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

Thanks

C

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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by cwadmin 1 -

Just giving this a bump.  Does anybody have any ideas or suggestions?

C

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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by Mary Cooch -
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Are your admins teachers in the course where the course events are?

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by cwadmin 1 -

Thanks for your response.

No.  The admin account I'm using to test this is my own, which is a site administrator with no lower roles/permissions allocated.  I have tried other admin accounts in case the issue was specific to a user account, but no dice.

Any users who have a role in a course see that course's events in their calendar, but the event doesn't show up in the calendar of the site administrators, despite events created previously showing up fine.

I suppose a workaround would be to enroll admins directly in all courses, but we have a lot of courses and a lot of admins so this wouldn't be a good long-term solution and would need manual maintenance for new courses.

C

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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by Алексей Кадин -

One of the ideas (and the most likely) - too many events available for your site admin.

Students and teachers see only events of the courses, they are enrolled in. So, they have more times less events and are able to see them all.

When you see course calendar - there are less events, so, you can see them all.

An when your are site administrator viewing all-site calendar - the number of events is out of the limit you can see.

Can i ask about some figures, the number of events starting one day, one week, one month? Average numbers, of course, not necessarily exact figures, just to compare with our ones.

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In reply to Алексей Кадин

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite

by cwadmin 1 -

Good idea, hadn't considered that as a potential issue

Looking at out database events table we have about 600 events in total, including assignment deadlines etc.  I didn't think thats excessive but maybe there's something in the site settings which is exacerbating the issue.

Because of this events issue, I've been holding off creating events for the 15/16 academic year so there's nothing but one test event for September onwards, but looking at June 2015 we had 30 events in total for the month.

May or may not be relevant that we have the calendar lookahead set to 1 year, versus default of 3 weeks (see screenshot below).  I thought this only affected the "latest events" block.  I have just tried reducing this value to 2 months and creating a new event within a course but I still couldn't see it as admin.  We also have calendar export lookahead and lookback set to 365 days, but again I understood that was only for iCal exports.

I suppose the next logical step might be to start deleting old events and seeing if new , but I'm loath to do this as they're a part of our archiving records.  Does 600 events sound high enough to cause issues?  If its relevant we're using the Essential theme.

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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite

by Алексей Кадин -

Well, the calendar lookahead and calendar export settings are not our case, I think.


There was a restriction for daily amount of events, figures like 20 for student and 50 for admin, independent from 'admin see all'. Not in the site settings, somewhere deep (or not deep) in the plugin code. We couldn't manage with it, so we decided that all-site admin do not have to see all events and he can see course calendar if he needs.


So, it's daily restriction including test and assignment startlines and deadlines and "events in realization" - starting before this day and/or finishing after this day. Nothing about old events. And in your case the daily amount now was like 1 event. And I can not guess, how your old events can affect this. Can your try to create site event, user (your) event, will you see them? And trying to turn off "latest events" block?

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In reply to Алексей Кадин

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite

by cwadmin 1 -

Thanks for your response

I tried turning off latest events plugin but didn't have an effect.  Both site and user events are shown in the admin calendar no problem (obviously user events in the calendar of that admin only).

I did a little more testing and worked out that I can set course events in courses from last academic year (14/15) with a date for this year (15/16) and it will show.  e.g. I createa course event from last year's "xyz course 14/15" on 5th October and it shows in admins' calendar, but if I create an identical course event in "xyz course 2015/16", it doesn't show up in the admin calendar.  It also turns out that group events within the 15/16 courses do show in the calendar, so this only applies to course-level events in the new year.

I have courses organised in categories, so I tried creating a test course in last year's category alongside the functioning courses, but this didn't work so its something specific to the courses (rather than at category level) and course events.

I wondered if it might be related to the start date of courses being in the future, but tried changing this so the start date is in the past (thinking that it might not put dates in the admin calendar until they become "current") for existing courses and for a newly created test course and didn't help.

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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite

by Ohad Dekel -

Hi,

Did you find any solution?

I have the same problem on my site and even wrote about it on some of the forums, but still no answer.
It started happening last year when we added more courses to open the spring semester (Moodle 2.8.5)

I tried all the stuff you mentioned too, didn't help. Upgraded to Moodle 2.9.1 and still no luck.

I am sure it's some kind of course limit, all events I create on old courses, do work.

We will be opening the year in 2 weeks and I don't have a way to see the entire schedule.

Any help will be really appreciated...


Thanks.

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In reply to Ohad Dekel

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite

by cwadmin 1 -

Hi Ohad,

No solution yet I'm afriad, but its nice to know we're not the only ones having this issue.

There could be mileage in it being a limit related to the number of courses.  We just need to delete half our courses to test the theory! smile  That said, I'm struggling to see how that would be the issue with much bigger organisations presumably with many more courses and events using Moodle than us. 

As you're having a similar problem, we can hopefully exclude a few things like the theme.  We're using Essential, what theme are you using?  We have 113 Moodle courses, how many do you have?

We've started running courses for 15/16 without admins being able to see the full schedule as well unfortunately, though students and tutors specifically allocated to courses can still see the events/course dates, which probably accounts for me not having been lynched by tutors and students yet smile

Thanks

C


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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite

by Ohad Dekel -

Hi C,

I tried deleting all old courses events (leaving just assignments events), and again, no luck.

As you said, the last option is to delete half of the old courses but it seems far fetched as our site has less then 60 courses. I feel like we are missing something because there is no way that this problem is not a big issue for bigger organizations.

We are using More theme for now and planning on switching to Evolve-D in few days.

BTW, some of our courses are in Hebrew and some in English so we can exclude languages too.

My next test is to export reports and check there.

Cheers,

Ohad


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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by Nadav Kavalerchik -
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Something related...

Long time ago, on Moodle 1.9, I used a little patch that convert course-level events to site-level events. Since we had similar issues. and eventually decided to move some course-level events to site-level.

It was not integrated into Moodle, but can easily added to latest Moodle 2.9

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-20576

If there is interest... I can try to upload an updated patch.

Hope it helps,

Nadav smile

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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by Ohad Dekel -

Hi,

Just wanted to let you know that a manager can see all events when you manually give a manager roll on each course.

So I think the problem is with site rolls and not course rolls.

This solution gave us an option to let the calendar managers see entire site schedule (all courses). Not the perfect solution but it works.

Hopefully this will help you guys and maybe help with finding the problem.

Cheers,

Ohad


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In reply to Ohad Dekel

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by cwadmin 1 -

Yes, users with course-level role assignments appear unaffected, its just the site-level admin assignments based on the "admins view all" setting...

Assigning a course-level role in all courses is a workaround, as is converting all course events to site events, however neither are practical in our situation.  The list of admin users changes fairly regularly and has enough people on it that I can see course-level role assignments turning into a major drain on time very quickly, not to mention confusing our tutors.  And converting to site-level, while that does sound like an interesting feature, would mean that students would see all courses' dates in their calendar rather than just their own, which is one of the big draws of using Moodle for calendar distribution.

I'll hang fire for now without a workable admin calendar (bigger fish to fry!) and hope we can get to the bottom of it soon

C

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In reply to cwadmin 1

Re: Course events not showing in admin site calendar, despite "admin's see all"

by Алексей Кадин -

I think, using cohorts will allow you to assign admins to all courses with course roles in one click.

You create a new cohort on site level. Then you should go to all courses and in each course create a new way of assigning to the course: synchronization with this new cohort, which should give role Manager in this course. You do this for each course, but once in your life. Then you just include new admins to the cohort or exclude old admins from it.

A point about metacourses: you need to add this new way of assigning to a course only to higher metacourse (assigning to which causes assigning to courses, dependent from it). So, really you add synchronization with our new cohort not to ALL courses in your site, but only to independent courses and higher metacourses.

If you need more roles, given by assignment through this cohort, you can another one "synchronization with cohort" for necessary courses, cohort will be the same, but assigned role would be other.

So, by this way you can set up assigning to all courses with local manager roles just once, then you include and exclude admins by one click.

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