README

A Moodle activity that helps the members of a course group agree on a meeting time. Each member marks when they are available on a time grid, everyone in the group sees where their availability overlaps, and a teacher (or, if allowed, any group member) confirms a time. The confirmed meeting goes into the group's calendar and the members are notified.

It is not a replacement for the Scheduler activity, where teachers offer appointment slots: here the group's shared availability decides the time.

Features

Availability grid: members mark times as available, if need be or unavailable. Click and drag on a desktop, tap on a touch screen (or switch on "Drag to select"), or use the keyboard: arrow keys, Home/End, Space or Enter to mark, Shift+arrow to mark while moving. Changes are saved automatically.
Group overlap heatmap: shows how many members are available at each time, with the names on hover or keyboard focus, and lists the best meeting times. A member counts for a meeting only if they are free for every slot the meeting spans.
Confirming a meeting: a teacher, or any group member when "Any group member may confirm" is enabled, confirms a time and an optional location or link. This creates a group calendar event and sends a notification to the group's members. The meeting can be moved or cancelled; the calendar event follows.
Automatic confirmation: optionally, at a chosen time, every group that has no meeting yet gets its most popular time confirmed. A meeting that someone confirmed or cancelled by hand is never changed.
Teacher overview: all groups with their response rate and meeting status.
Groups and groupings (separate and visible groups), activity completion ("submitted availability"), course reset, backup and restore, the privacy API, events and the Moodle 5 course overview page.

Timezones

All times are stored as UTC timestamps and shown in each user's own timezone.

The date range and the daily time window are set in the activity timezone, which defaults to the timezone of the teacher creating the activity. "09:00-17:00" means 09:00-17:00 in that timezone on every day, including across a daylight saving time change. Each person sees the grid laid out in their own timezone, so a participant elsewhere in the world may see the times on other dates or at other hours, and around a DST change in either timezone the rows shift accordingly.

Requirements

Moodle 4.5 LTS to 5.3 ($plugin->supported = [405, 503]).
JavaScript for marking availability.

Installation

Copy the plugin to mod/findatime (on Moodle 5.1 and later: public/mod/findatime) and visit Site administration > Notifications, or run admin/cli/upgrade.php.

Settings

Setting	Meaning
Activity timezone	Timezone of the dates and daily times
First day, Last day	Date range (at most 62 days)
Daily start time, Daily end time	Daily window, in 15 minute steps
Slot size	15, 30 or 60 minutes
Meeting length	A whole number of slots
Allow "if need be" answers	Offer the third status
Any group member may confirm	Let members confirm or cancel for their own group
Confirm automatically at	When to confirm the most popular time for groups without a meeting

A grid may hold at most 2000 slots. Changing the timing after people have answered is allowed; answers for times that are no longer on the grid are ignored.

Capabilities

Capability	Default roles
`mod/findatime:addinstance`	Editing teacher, manager
`mod/findatime:view`	Student, teacher, editing teacher, manager
`mod/findatime:respond`	Student
`mod/findatime:confirm`	Teacher, editing teacher, manager
`mod/findatime:viewreports`	Teacher, editing teacher, manager

Someone with mod/findatime:confirm can confirm for groups they belong to, or for any group if they can access all groups. To designate a student as a group's coordinator, override mod/findatime:confirm for them in the activity, or enable "Any group member may confirm".

Good to know

A confirmed meeting is a group calendar event, so it appears in the calendars of that group's members. Moodle does not show another group's module events to a teacher who is not in any group of the course, so teachers follow the meetings on the activity's overview page.
Restoring a course with a new start date moves the activity's dates, the availability and the meetings by whole days, keeping their local times.

Web services

mod_findatime_get_grid, mod_findatime_save_availability, mod_findatime_get_overlap and mod_findatime_cancel_meeting are available to AJAX and to the Moodle app service; the Moodle app itself is not supported yet.

adamjenkins / moodle-mod_findatime

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