At my institution we block out periods at the start of each year for Moodle outages for updates, patches, etc. These are collated in an external calendar and made available to all staff and students. The outages are also entered as Site events in the Moodle calendar, but we still have issues with staff scheduling assessment over, or even starting and concluding during, outage periods. Despite various people trying to allocate blame, adherence to procedure etc. it's the students that ultimately suffer. What I'd like is a plugin or suggestion as to something that warns or prevents this behaviour.
I haven't been able to locate anything, but that doesn't mean it doesn't already exist, there are lots of plugins, and I might not be searching fo the right term.
Ideally, what I'd like is something that:
1) Warns staff that the period between available and due warns of any outage when saving any assessment item. Eg. Warning, the period of this assessment contains the following site event(s). <list of events>
2) Prevents staff from allocating any due date time that falls within a site (or specific even, we currently use site events only for outages, this wouldn't work for every scenario) event. Eg. This assessment is due during a system event <list of events>, please choose another time.
The second option is possibly pushing things a bit far, but I'd definitely like to see something that could do the first item.
Cheers,
Adam