https://github.com/danmarsden/moodle-mod_attendance/pull/210
My initial thoughts were that this should be a separate setting - allowing teachers to decide if the session should appear in the calendar, but as Brendan points out this is not how most activities work - does anyone have a real use-case for an Attendance session to be created but not shown as in the course calendar? If there isn't a proper use-case we probably shouldn't add a new setting.
IMO the setting should be there at least for compatibility reasons i.e. if there are already sessions and calendar events (done separately from the plugin, as most users have at the moment), the plugin won't ruin the schedules with duplicates.
But apart from that I can't really come up with a use-case where you don't want create calendar events.
Thanks Vyacheslav - I hadn't thought about duplicate calendar entries for historical sessions - I was thinking we might be able to write a script that automatically added events in the calendar for all existing sessions but maybe the script could just do that for all future sessions?
Though I think adding events for all future sessions not always seems right. Teachers/admins could add events in advance. So what about searching for events with same duration and start time as session has and create (or not) events depending on that search result?
I think that might end up with a weird mis-match of sessions with linked calendar events and some without. I'm actually leaning towards just creating events for all sessions (historical and future) and making it clear to users during upgrade that any manually created events may need cleaning up.
... But I'm keen to hear from other people in the forums here - if there's really a case for it to be a setting like you have implemented so far we won't need to do all the other work.
Hi - we are using the attendance and I was wondering if there is any way to avoid all entries in the attendance showing up in the Calendar? We have the same course for several campuses and several groups with different starting dates, so the calendar is an important tool...however it gets flooded with attendance entries, which makes it hard for students to see the other important activities in the calendar.
Dan:
I am with a community college in the United States and we began to use the updated Attendance plugin with the Moodlerooms 3.1 Release in December 2016. Feedback from faculty about the plugin has indicated they feel that the Attendance calendar events are providing too much information and clutter for students. Faculty think these extra events may cause students to miss assignment and quiz deadlines.
A setting that would allow individual instructors to turn on or off Attendance calendar events would be very helpful for us.
Thank you for asking for input!
It's probably worth mentioning that in 3.3 a lot more information will be pushed to the calendar as part of the work on MDL-55611 - I haven't seen if they are implementing the ability to disable events for a particular module from showing in the calendar though.
This is not part of the Statement of Work (the revised Calendar is an MUA project) but definitely good idea. I am also wanting to see Course start and end dates added to the calendar and think that we should have course start and end times as well.
I heartily agree with Steve. Feedback from our faculties at the state university where I work has been universally -- "How do I keep attendance from flooding/cluttering my course calendar?" The complaint is that it dilutes important events that faculty wish to stand out, like quizzes and assignments. We've even gone so far as to recommend a workaround of putting all the students in a group (even if there's no other need), and creating group attendance sessions instead of course ones, so they can be filtered off.
In my opinion, at the VERY least, put a GUI switch in for the teacher to opt OUT of placing course attendance events on the calendar.
Thanks!
I created a Moodle Tracker improvement request for this. Feel free to vote for the issue.
thanks - in the meantime, one of our existing clients provided some funding to pay for my time to add a setting to control this. currently only in the versions in github for 3.2, 3.3 but I will publish to the plugins db sometime soon.
I'd like to kindly add my thanks to 1) those who funded it, and 2) those who implemented the suggested changes. Both pedagogically and in terms of clear course management, this was creating a lot of 'static' and we heard universally negative feedback from our faculty. Options are good.
Thanks again.
Hi Dan,
Do we have this option available now? If yes, could you please help me with the steps to do that.
If not, can you please suggest some workaround to remove this from calendar.
Thanks
it's in the latest version for all versions higher than 3.2 (not in the 3.1 branch)
go to admin > plugins > activities > attendance
Then have a look on that page and you should find an option to do it.
Thanks Dan, it is working fine.
