Moodle plugins directory: Scheduler

Hi Henning,

Thank you for this plugin, it is a very useful. I've been unable to insert pictures on the comments under edit action because when I click the "Insert/Edit image" in editor it opens a windows without the "Find or upload an image" option, but it always gives me the option in the other.

Hi Henning, I'm writing in reply to your comment on dated Mon, 14 Jul 2014, 7:39 AM in which you wrote, "Sorry, guest users are currently not able to use Scheduler at all (not even to see the available slots)."

In order to facilitate peer tutoring, I've created a course in every category (categories include physics, chemistry, geometry, etc) called "Tutors" in which all students are assigned the role of teacher (which I've renamed "Peer tutor") so that they, if they wish, can create a Scheduler activity of their own. That way, students who want to be peer tutors in a specific course category can offer time slots to other students.

I don't want the students in search of peer tutoring to have to enroll in the "course" just to schedule a time slot with a peer tutor, though. Thus, I would like anyone logged into my Moodle site but not enrolled in the Tutors "course" to be able to click on any student's Scheduler activity and be able to book a time. I have enabled guest access to the course to accomplish this, but when a student clicks to on any student's Scheduler activity link, the following message appears: "Guests can't do anything here."

Is it possible to allow users logged into Moodle but not enrolled in the "course" in which Scheduler activities are posted to actually book time slots? Thanks a lot.

PS - You can visualize what I’m trying to replicate by looking at the first screen in this video:



That’s not my video; I’m just trying to replicate the idea of a “course” in which all tutors are listed on the same page and students can click to book time with any of them.

Hello

as I wrote to Olga privately, I would not recommend to give the "mod/scheduler:attend" capability to guests. This capability is normally assigned to *teachers* and Scheduler is not tested in the context of students/guests having this capability, so some unwanted behaviour may well occur.

Hi,
thank you for the helpful plugin! I wonder if you could adjust the content of the mail to include information on the date (day and time) of the appointment? I receive many mails that a student has made an appointment - but without knowing if this is for "tomorrow" or "in two weeks" (for example), this is not as helpful as it could be...

I am absolutely loving this plugin, the most used and useful of all plugins I have installed.

There is, however, one badly-needed option I could sure use, so this is mostly a FEATURE REQUEST:

The ability for the student to add a short comment when selecting a slot.
Example: Teacher creates open slots for students, intended as an "open door" kind of meeting. It would be great if a student selecting a slot could add a "subject of the meeting" type of comment so the teacher can prepare for the meeting. Even if it were a system messages kind of then, someway there is a comment attached to that reserved slot.

The current work-around is rather clumsy: Elect a slot, then hit the teacher's profile, hit the message button, leave a message regarding that future meeting. The problem is the message is not connected to or linked to that appointment slot, which makes things messy.

I don't know if this is doable or how difficult it would be, but I can hope-and-pray, can't I?

@Guido Roessling: The e-mail content can be customized using "Language Customization" (https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Language_customisation). Look for the key "scheduler/email_applied_html". (However, in the default setting and in the English language pack this does contain date and time of the appointment - possibly it has been changed in your installation?)

@Ron Andrade: Similar features have been requested by others, see https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-5343 . Your input there would be welcome. I'm not planning to add this on the short-term but it is, say, on my medium-term list.

Hi Henning. Many thanks for providing this plugin to the community; its functionality is really appreciated by our staff and students, and we’re really grateful to you for your efforts to maintain and update it.

On that note, please could I quickly query whether you have any plans to update the plugin to be fully compatible with Moodle v3.1, and its new Global Search feature in particular? To clarify: while we’ve tested the Scheduler plugin under v3.1 and all of the core functionality seems to work fine, we’ve found that instances of the activity are not searchable via v3.1’s Global Search feature. Please see the following screenshot for details, which lists all of the available areas that can searched under v3.1 (note that these settings are available via: Site Administration -> Plugins -> Search -> Manage Global Search):

http://imgur.com/lWWQByE

Note also that the above screenshot was taken on a v3.1 system where the Scheduler plugin is installed and available. However, as you can see, the Scheduler activity is not listed as being available to be searched. Obviously, this is likely to be a significant problem/cause of confusion for users who might want to search for specific instances of the Scheduler activity across Moodle.

I’m not a developer, but my understanding is that mod plugins can be made searchable relatively easily via the addition of a new search class within the plugin’s codebase (located at ../classes/search/activity.php). Please see the following for further details:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=334938
https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Global_search
https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Search_API

We really hope this search capability can be added to Scheduler as I’m sure it would be a huge benefit to our users (as well as those of other v3.1 systems) and, again, many thanks for all your efforts to develop this plugin and share it with the community.

Best wishes,
Lina

Hi Lina
you already sent me the same question by private message on 28 May and I replied by e-mail on 29 May. Please do not send these in duplicate. In case the message got lost, I'm copying my reply below.

---

I'm planning to release a specific 3.1 branch of Scheduler later this year, probably by the end of September. This will include some added functionality, and I also hope to look into the new global search feature.

However, it's not quite clear to me at this point what content in Scheduler should actually be searchable. It seems that most plugins (including core) currently allow to search the activity description only. This should be quite easy to add to Scheduler, but I'm not quite sure how useful it would actually be (many users in our installation actually leave the activity description empty).

From your message it seems that you have some particular use case in mind, maybe you can let me know what users are actually looking for?

Hi Henning,
I'm sorry that our mail server has blocked your private email, so I didn't receive that email in time. Sorry for the inconvenience this caused. Thanks a lot for your prompt reply.
The Scheduler plugin is one of the most popular activities to our teachers and students. Our teachers will provide guidance description for the students to read before they start to book appointments. For example, our Language Centre will provide one to one tutorial for students and usually, it will be many different scheduler activities open for students to book different appointments. So the description is frequently used. If we can search the title and description of the scheduler activity, it will be easier for students to find the right topic they want to book. Also for teachers, it will be easier to manage the schedulers by search the key word in the title or description.
We will be really looking forward to your new release with the global search feature.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Lina

Hi Lina
Just to say that the search functionality for Scheduler titles/descriptions is now included in the master branch on github and will be released as part of Scheduler 3.1, expected in August or September.

Hi Henning,
Thanks a lot for your great help. I'll be looking forward to the release of Scheduler 3.1.
Best wishes,
Lina

Hi Henning,

This is a really great plugin and is working great except for one issue that I'm not sure how to handle.

Is there any possibility that you could add an option to limit the number of appointments within a given day, but still giving a range of appointment times above that limit?

For example, I want to schedule my students between 12pm and 6pm Monday through Friday in 20 minute increments and 30 minutes between each time slot. I would like them to have the choice of any of those 20 minute time slots within that time frame, but I want to limit the appointments to only 3 students per day, therefore only taking up 3 time slots out of the 7 that are created for any given day. After 3 are filled, I would like it to cancel the rest of the time slots.

Is this possible?

Dear Henning,
With great joy we use the schedule plugin. This helps to let our students be responsible for their own participation. However I encountered a problem.

I am not sure yet if it is the template, or the plugin. But after a teacher created time slots, it becomes impossible for him to add new time slots until he deleted the time slots or all time slots are expired . I will test the issue also with a different theme (we use the essential theme).

Moodle 2.9.6
latest PHP

Frank Weissman

Dear Frank, I'm not quite sure about the problem, and have never seen this before. When you say "it becomes impossible from him to add new time slots", do you mean that the "Add slots" button is no longer being displayed, or is there any other error message? If you can reproduce the problem, it might be best to open a ticket on the Moodle Tracker (https://tracker.moodle.org/) where I can follow this up further.