Scheduler to organize meetings with your students. Do you or your TA's hold weekly "virtual"...

Mike.B.559

Scheduler to organize meetings with your students. Do you or your TA's hold weekly "virtual" office hours? If so, how do your students sign up for times? We are new to BrightSpace and the absence of this kind of tool in the platform leaves a big hole. An easy to set up, responsive, and fully-integrated scheduler is a real must-have. How are people working around this?

 

There is an item on the PIE requesting the addition of this sort of tool if you're interested in throwing your support behind it:

 

https://desire2learn.brightidea.com/ideas/D6435

Maarten.d.763

Great PIE! We use the Groups tool as a workaround. Not ideal, but it does the trick:

1. Make a new Group Category.
2. Choose an enrollment type with self-enrollment (I prefer '# of Groups, Capacity of # - Self Enrolment')
3. Number of users: 1 (if we're talking about one-on-one sessions with a TA) or more (if we're talking about Q&A sessions which multiple students should be able to register for).
4. Number of groups: the amount of time slots that are available.
5. After saving this Group Category, we rename the Groups from 'Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, etc.' to 'April 16th, 3:00-3:30 pm', 'April 16th 3:30-4:00 pm', etc.
6. We let students know they can 'register to one of these timeslots' (in reality: subscribe to one of these groups) by putting a Quick Link to the register page of this Group Category in a course announcement.

 

Kind regards,

Maarten

Maarten.d.763

Small addition: if enrollment to one of these time slots is supposed to be restricted to a certain group of students, you can use the 'Restrict Enrollment To' function in the Group Category setup screen.

Mike.B.559

Thanks for taking the time to put together this reply Maarten. Quick question: Can these slots be replicated? For instance, what if you wanted the same timeslots for each week of the semester? Would you just need to make one week's worth...and then copy?

Maarten.d.763

Hi Mike. Unfortunately, you cannot copy a Group Category. How long in advance should students have to be able to register to these time slots? If students should be able to register to a slot – say – a few weeks in advance, then I see no other option but to make all the groups/time slots you need when creating the Group Category. If, however, students usually only register to a time slot a few days or a week in advance, you could consider just creating groups/time slot for one week and wiping these slots clean at the end of each week by manually unenrolling the students that registered to them. That’s relatively easily done by unchecking checkboxes within the Group Category.

Wendy.L.931

This is an amazing idea! Thank you for sharing.

 

I have a trick for stuff that cannot be copied in Brightspace and I just tested and it works for this too. What I do is use a source course to copy stuff from.

1. As an example, I created the self-enrollment groups with 5 interview times in a Source course.
2. Open a destination course and copy just those interview times into it.
3. Then changed the date to something like April 20, or whatever your need.
4. Then copied just that group from the same course again
5. Then changed to another date (like April 22).
6. Repeat the copy for as many as you need.

 

This copying from another course method works for other things too. I was using it last week for Checklists, as an example.

Hope that helps!

Maarten.d.763

That is a nifty trick, Wendy. Duly noted!

Mike.B.559

Thanks for the insights Maarten...and if I thought this would work for larger groups with multiple TA's and multiple time slots I would go for it. Unfortunately, I just don't see Groups as a scaleable solution. The absence of a built-in scheduler tool leaves a huge hole for us.

 

This request has been on the PIE since 2013 with considerable support and I find it surprising that no action has been taken on it.