Home > audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure > Calendaring: How to view all your Moodle course calendars in one place (like live@edu, Google calendar or MS-Outlook)

Calendaring: How to view all your Moodle course calendars in one place (like live@edu, Google calendar or MS-Outlook)

2011/11/16 Leave a comment Go to comments
  1. UPDATE: this does work, just make sure to give it some time to update AND to have actual appointments in the time window (length of that window is a setting you can change in Moodle) that you are trying to display.
  2. Static inclusion of syllabus deadlines in your calendar
    1. Go to your Moodle Course / “Go to calendar…” / select from dropdown: “Upcoming Events”:   “All courses”/ click on “Export Calendar/iCal. Open with MS-Outlook (fails in IE8).
    2. Here is showing how: screencast demo loading Moodle’s iCal into MS-Outlook (desktop).
    3. This is a static export of all your Moodle calendar information – taught and enrolled courses combined  (despite image_thumb showing in each of your courses. The dropdown: “Upcoming Events” does default to the current course, though).
    4. The utility of this (= what “all” comprises, and how helpful the event information is) depends on how the course designers use the Moodle calendar functionality – or allow Moodle to do it for them: For setting a start/end (= deadline) for any assignment or assessment automagically adds this event to the Moodle course calendar.
  3. A potentially even more useful dynamic subscription(that will reflect late-breaking changes, like extended deadlines in your courses or additional assignments)
    1. you can get if you right click on image_thumb2 and choose “Copy link” from the context menu.
    2. I have not found a way to feed the Moodle iCal link manually into MS-Outlook 2010 (Shared Calendars / Add Calendar / From Internet) or OWA (different problem comes and goes. Just subscribe while problem is gone Smile). In MS-Outlook, you can subscribe to this link via menu:tools / tab:internet calendars / button: new / dialogue new internet calendar subscription / paste the URL you copied. moodle-calendar-outlook-2010-subscri[1]
    3. Don’t forget to rename your calendar to something more useful than the default, like “My classes”, by right-clicking and choosing “Rename”in OWA or “Properties” in Outlook2010.
    4. moodle-calendar-outlook-2010-subscri[3]moodle-calendar-outlook-2010-subscri[2]
    5. Your syllabus deadlines are now always only two clicks away in your Ninermail:
      1. click on “Calendar”
      2. click on checkbox “Moodle”.
  4. What seems not possible with any current version of Moodle is editing/updating your calendar in MS-Outlook and having the changes synch with Moodle, or any import actually – only the opposite direction works. So the tool is more useful for students (who don’t need to edit) than teachers (but still a nice aggregator of teaching information for the latter).
  5. More on Calendar you can find in the official 1.9 Moodle calendar doc and FAQ.
  6. I would prefer to use other calendaring software, but the export options of the Moodle (1.9 and 2.)) calendars are limiting. So I also find myself adjusting the settings when using the Moodle calendar:

calendar-19-preferences_thumb1

  1. Adjusting these settings may also fix the following error in OWA which reads like ICS link is invalid/broken, but may only mean that no events where returned for the time window that Moodle defaults to (with performance reasons, which, however, does not apply if Moodle does not have to return *any* events to your request).  In other words: Try expanding the time window for events, e.g. to include the full term.moodle-calendar-owa-subscribing3
Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure Tags: , ,
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