General help

I held off on the following in my earlier comment but seeing the mega comment from David Monllaó above I'll add this in too.

Many Moodle sites don't use fixed dates for participation in courses. In these cases participants join a course at dates which suit them. The course start date can be somewhat redundant, as can a fixed end date. Ideally Moodle would have a mechanism for recognising an event e.g. first access to the course, date of enrolment or some other trigger with the end date being relative to this. Of course this is more of an enrolment and/or course format issue and is not without it's own challenges e.g. external enrolment methods, re-enrolment and probably more.

As a minimum it should be possible to configure in each course whether the start date appears in the course overview entry.

As with my other observation above, let's not have a great new feature that leads to confusion or irrelevant information displayed to students.

Sorry for the delayed response, Ray Lawrence. Things have been a little hectic here as we near release. I’ll try to address a few of your concerns.

re: access restrictions
We’re using all of the standard module/activity access and capability checks on the logged in user when determining whether they should see the event on not. That means when a student doesn’t have access to a particular activity they will not see that activity’s events in their my overview block.

In addition to that we are also respecting modules (such as assignment) that support group and user overrides for specific events (such as a due date extension) so that the student only sees a single event that is most relevant to them.

re: course start dates
In the case where a course has a start date but no end date then it will remain as “in-progress” in the my overview block and will remain visible to the user. Unfortunately we don’t have another mechanism to determine if a course is currently in-progress so we rely on the start date being set correctly.

The my overview block will only be displaying activities that have a defined end date that the student must complete some action by, for example an assignment with a due date. If the activity has no date by which something must be actioned then it won’t be displayed on the my overview block.

As it stands we don’t have any support for any sort of relative end dates, for example an assignment that is due 4 weeks after the student enrols in the course. That functionality would be really cool however it’s a bit beyond the scope for this release. Please feel free to create some issues in the tracker for further improvements to this block that you’d like to see. MDL-58384 is probably the best place to add something, if you'd like to.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Hopefully that made some sense but please let me know if I didn't and you'd like me to explain anything further.