The Scheduler activity provides a quick and easy way to schedule time slots for office hours, group presentations, in-person/zoom oral exams, and more. You can set up one time or recurring meetings, require students to sign up, limit the number of students per slot, and allow students to upload files to the scheduled meeting. You can also provide a grade for the activity, which can be useful when office hours are a required part of the grade or when scheduling oral exams for language courses.
1. On your course page, click "Add an activity or resource" and select Scheduler.
2. Give your Scheduler a name (e.g., "Office Hours") and provide details in the "Introduction" field if desired.
3. Set the default length of each slot in minutes. If you want to prevent late signups or cancellations, set the Guard time (the minimum amount of time before a slot that a student can sign up or cancel). You can also turn on notifications if you want to receive an email whenever a slot is booked or cancelled.
4. Change other settings if desired (such as enabling grading or allowing students to upload files. See "Other Settings" section) and save the scheduler.
5. You can now schedule meeting slots by clicking "Add slots." See the next two sections of this article for instructions on how to schedule Single Slots or Multiple/Recurring Slots.
1. Click "Add Slots" and then Add Single Slot.
2. Set the time, length, and location for the slot. You could provide the Zoom link generated through the Zoom LTI Pro tool in the location field if you want to ensure students know where to find it. Note that you will want to have the waiting room enabled if you use one long meeting for all the slots instead of having individual Zoom meetings for each meeting.
If you are setting up group slots (for example, slots for group presentations) make sure the maximum number of students per slot is larger than the largest group. Each student will need to enroll themselves in the slot their group decides on.
3. Optionally, schedule a specific student for the slot
4. Save. Your scheduled slot will now be displayed. You can delete the slot by clicking on the trash can or edit it by clicking on the gear icon.
1. Click "Add Slots" and then "Add Repeated Slots."
2. Set the dates you want the Office Hours to start and end, what days they will be on, and the time window for the slots
3. Set how long each Office Hour slot will be, how many students can sign up for each slot, and provide the location.
4. Specify if you want GauchoSpace to send email reminders for the meetings and then save. Email reminders can be set for the day before up to several days before the slot and all email reminders are sent out in the early morning.
5. The scheduled slots will then be displayed. You can click on the trash can next to a slot to delete it or the gear icon to edit it.
Grading. If you want to assign students a grade for the meetings scheduled through this activity, you can enable grades in the Grading section of the settings. The grade for the scheduler activity will then automatically transfer to the Gradebook. Note that it will only add one grade item to the Gradebook. If you allow students to schedule multiple slots within this activity, you can set how the multiple slots' grades are combined into a single grade using the "Grading Strategy" dropdown menu.
To grade a slot, click on the gear icon in the scheduler view.
Scroll down and you will see the participants who were scheduled for the slot. Next to each participant's name there is an option to assign them a grade.
Once you have given them a grade, it will show up next to their name in the schedule view.
Allowing students to upload files. This option could be useful if you want students to upload specific files to discuss ahead of time. For example, you might have students upload an essay draft that you will discuss during the meeting.
To enable file upload, change "Use booking form" to Yes and then specify the maximum number of files the students can upload.
Group Slots. If you want students to sign up as groups (e.g. for group presentations), make sure the maximum number of students is set to the maximum group size you are allowing. Each student will need to enroll themselves in the slot their group has selected.
-
"Office Hours are full": this is often an issue when the maximum number of students per slot was set to 1 and all the slots were booked.
- "The slot on _____ cannot be created due to conflicting slots": this error message shows up after you try to book slots for a host that is already scheduled for a slot at that time. This is designed to help prevent "double booking."
The scheduler checks for conflicts in all the schedules in the course, so the conflict is not necessarily in the current scheduler activity. If you think this message is in error, check that the correct host is set for each meeting. This error often occurs when users assign a meeting slot to the wrong host.