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Scheduler is a Moodle Activity that allows the course instructor to post available meeting times and then have the students sign up for the slot that best suits them. This is useful for required meetings between student and professor, such as advising days, or simply for optional office hours.

Setting up a Scheduler

• Select Scheduler under the Activities pull-down menu.

• There will be a page that allows you to give the Scheduler a name (like “Mid-Term office hours”) and a larger description of the event, which will be shown with the available slots. Choose whether or not a student may sign up for multiple appointments.

• Click on Save Changes.

If you wanted to, you could finish there, and a note would simply appear on the page telling students to email the professor and set up a time and date for an appointment. However, if you want them to be able to do this from Moodle, you will need to click on Add Slots or Add Single Slots.

• Add Slots will take you to a page with a lot of pull-down menus and checkboxes. Pick the dates you want your Scheduler to cover.

• Where the days of the week are listed, check which days you want to have the same times for appointments (ie, common time on Tuesdays and Thursday). Whatever times you pick on this page will be listed on whatever days you have marked; you cannot mark a different time on a different day without adding a separate slot.
• Select the time. Note that the times are 24 time, as elsewhere in Moodle, so 2 is 2:00 am.
• Choose the location, and then select the staff member (TA, professor, etc) who will be available at that time

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• If divide into slots is checked, Moodle will list each appointment as a separate entity (much more logical and easy to understand at a glance this way).

• Type in the duration for each appointment.
• Choose whether appointments will be one-on-ones, or group meetings with a staff member.
• Next, you can choose when Moodle shows the appointment on the student’s Moodle page. “Now” seems the most logical.

• Last on this page is the option to email a reminder automatically. You can set Moodle to send out a generic reminder weeks before the appointment, or the morning of, and a variety of other options in between. (You can also compose invitations and reminders manually from the Scheduler page.)
• Click on Save Changes.

Moodle will now return you to the Scheduler page, where you can continue to Add Slots (adding a single slot is very similar to adding multiple slots), send invitations or reminders to the students, and view the slots that you have set up for the students.

The chart of available appointments will show you the basic information about the appointment time (who the staff member is, if it is a group time slot). Students select the slot they want by clicking on the round buttons next to the time.

If you wish to edit individual slots, the list of appointments at the top of the page and at the top of the detailed chart will allow you to delete or change each slot, if you chose for Moodle to divide the slots. Otherwise, they will show up as blocks of available appointment time.