Our faculty wants a "major assignments" master calendar, in order to identify days on which too many teachers have scheduled major assignments before they impact students. In Moodle, students automatically see all the assignments in their courses. I want a way for each teacher to see a summary of major assignments schoolwide as they schedule their own. To complicate matters further, it would be most helpful for a teacher to automatically see what major assignments their students (not all students) have on a given day.

I am thinking about how to implement such a feature in Moodle. (I am an average programmer). Since we want to track only major assignments, we need to find a way to distinguish major from regular assignments. We also need to write a function to count major assignments for the given day only for students enrolled in the class.

Ideally, this counting function would fire as the teacher selects the assignment date. That way, the teacher could easily move the assignment from one day to another and see the impact on students' workloads.

In our school, it would be less work to create a new assignment type called "major assignment" than it would be to add a "major" checkbox to each assignment type. In our school, major assignments are not likely to be submitted electronically, and keeping the function in a separate module would avoid making changes to Moodle core code.

I could use your advice and feedback on this idea. Is anyone else working on a similar idea? Is there a better way to approach this task? Am I missing an existing feature in Moodle that could help me achieve this end?

Many thanks.

Update

I also posted this to the Moodle forums. Here's an encouraging reply I received only seven minutes after submitting the question. Isn't that amazing?

Re: Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
by Gary Anderson - Sunday, 27 July 2008, 07:42 PM

Hi Richard:

We have implemented this at our school. We have teachers label assignments by putting them in bold (we have a patch that adds the tag to the title. We also have a simple block that looks for assignments that have this tag and counts the number of affected users. We have taken the extra step of having a user profile field that shows if they are in the class of 2007, etc.

It works nicely and has avoided many scheduling conflicts. While we are not prepared to put this in Contrib, hopefully the above ideas will get you started, and I can send you are code on an "as is" basis if you contact me.

--Gary

I also just figured out that Gary is from Seattle Academy of Arts and Science, which I hope to visit in October.

tags: moodle, homework

Facebook is apparently still learning how to handle married couples. Does that mean that I am too old/not in the right stage of life for it?



In related news, my friends from outside work are increasingly getting on Facebook. It's interesting to watch and participate.

tags: facebook, sns

A colleague asked about school intranets the other day. Here is my response.

What purpose does your intranet serve?

The insideCatlin web site provides tools and resources for those members of the Catlin Gabel community who come to school every day, students, teachers, staff, and parents.

What are you using your intranet for?

Course web sites, committee web sites, department web sites, publishing student work to the Catlin Gabel community, sharing photos from school events and trips, online discussions, parent-faculty association meeting recordings, library catalog, volunteer signups, carpool map, surveys, senior project reports, blogs, podcasts, wikis, videos, audio recordings, community service hours, bookstore point-of-sale, IT loaner tracking, online signups for special academic programs, teacher notes on students, curriculum map editing tool, teacher access to student schedules and information, school archives.

What format are you currently using? (ie. Drupal, Sharepoint)

Moodle, Drupal, Menalto Gallery, Follett Destiny, and custom Perl/PHP scripts. Most use a common graphic interface to provide visual consistency when moving from one tool to the next. They also share the same authentication databases (LDAP + mySQL), and two of the three have single sign-on. We provide database support in mySQL, and some scripts read data from Education Edge, our students information system.

How could we use the intranet to help the teachers/ staff/ students?

That’s a pretty big question. An intranet enables community members to continue to interact in rich ways when face-to-face interactions are not possible. So list the types of interactions or transactions you wish to amplify, and then consider whether they would work within an online interface. If yes, then build it, see how it flies, and then promote it heavily.

tags: intranet, moodle, drupal, webdesign