Calendar Tool

Calendar allows students, teaching assistants, and instructors to exchange information about class events quickly and effectively. Before you and your students can use Calendar, you must add it to your course. For more information, see Add Page or Tool.

Depending on the calendar settings chosen, both instructors and students can post public calendar entries (visible to everyone in the course) or private ones (visible only to the author). Entries can be written in simple text or HTML. Calendar entries may include links to course content or to external websites, notification of assignment due dates, changes to instructor office hours, or any other scheduling information you wish to record.

a. Viewing Calendar from inside the course:
Add the Calendar Tool to your course. Put it on the Course Menu, the Homepage or both.

Standard icon is indicated as above. When the calendar has new entries, the standard icon will radiate green stripes to indicate this.

Select either the icon or the link on the Course Menu.

When new entries have been made (indicated by the radiating green stripes), selecting the icon or link produces a popup window that will display events that have been added since the Calendar was last accessed (as below). Close the window to send the popup away.

After the popup is read, close it and the Calendar appears in the main window. Access a specific date by selecting the number hotlink associated with it. Also note that you can move throughout months using buttons and dropboxes.

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b. Viewing Calendar from the "myWebCT" area

Add the Calendar Tool to your course. Put it on the Course Menu, the Homepage or both.

To allow students to select a direct link to the Calendar (when new items that students haven't seen yet have been added to the Calendar) set up the "Course News" area of your course so that the Calendar icon appears as a hotlink on participants "myWebCT" page.

To access the "Course News" area of your course, select "Control Panel".

Select "Course Settings" (located to the far right)...

Then select the "Customize course news" hotlink button (lower right).

Enable the dropbox corresponding to the appropriate area you wish to customize (in this case, Calendar) and then select the level of customization you wish to apply.

Choices ("Do not display", "Display with link", and "Display without link") are available for each of the dynamic tools (Assignments, Calendar, Discussions, Mail, My Grades, Quiz and Survey) and are selectable via the associated dropbox.

Note: The default is the "Display with link" setting.

Make sure you select the "Update" hotlink button to apply the selection!

If you choose "Display with link", a convenient shortcut connected to the Calendar area in your MSU WebCT course is created.

Note: You do not have to display course news on student's "my_WebCT" pages. In fact, some designers do not want student's to be alerted via their "my_WebCT" page and to facilitate this preference they select "Do not display" (which means that an icon DOES NOT appear alerting students to calendar changes). This tends to force the student to go into the WebCT course to check for new information. Other designers want the icon to appear in the student's "myWebCT" area when Calendar changes occur - but still want the students to go into the course. In this instance, they will typically select the "Display without link" choice.

When the "Display with link" choice is enabled, any time that new public calendar items are posted by the designer the "Course News" icon displays on student's "myWebCT" page. Hovering over the icon reveals it as a hotlink.

Selecting the Calendar icon hotlink takes you directly into the Calendar area of the course and produces a popup window that will display events that have been added since the Calendar was last accessed (as below). Close the window to send the popup away.

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II. Working with the Calendar

a. Set Calendar defaults (settings)

Go into the Calendar tool itself...

Select "Edit settings" hotlink button...

The default settings that WebCT applies to the Calendar Tool are displayed (as below). Select (or deselect) radio buttons and/or checkboxes to set the defaults that you wish to use. Select "Update" to complete the process.

Note:

• private calendar entries are always displayed in italics
  • public entries are viewable by all in the course
  • private entries only appear on the calendar of the individual who made the entry
• recommended: set the instructor default access level to public
  • this assures that student's can view course related entries... without you even having to think about it!
• all instructor/student default settings apply also to the global calendar views

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b. create/edit/delete calendar entries

Select the "Add entry" hotlinked button (as below). Note that you can also go into specific date areas to add entries.

The "Add a Calendar Entry" page appears (as below). Whenever adding an entry, this "form" is used.

• Note: This is also the page that student's see if the designer enables "Public" or "Private" entries for the students.

The calendar entry appears on the main calendar...

Edit entry (example): The student's cannot see the entry (because it is currently private). To edit the entry, select the date number corresponding to the day the entry appears on...

Select the radio button corresponding to the entry you wish to change and then select "Edit".

Note: This is also an area where you can "Delete" entries one at a time or "Delete all from day" by selecting the appropriate hot-linked button.

Make the necessary changes (in this case, changing a "private" entry to a "public" entry - as below).

Results:

Delete entry (example): To delete an entry (or multiple entries), select the appropriate radio button (when deleting singly) and then select "Delete" (as below), or, if clearing the entire day, select "Delete all from day"

A warning dialogue box appears, select "OK" and the entry is deleted.

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c. establish an internal link

To establish an internal link out of the calendar a content module must be present in the course.

When adding (or editing) an entry, select the appropriate content module from the "Internal link" dropbox (as below)

Select "Add" and the entry is created (as below)

The internal link displays as a hotlink in the calendar entry (as below)

Selecting the internal link takes the user directly to the Content Module (in this case "Get Started")

Any Content Module in the course can be used to establish an internal link from a calendar date to the appropriate content module.

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d. establish an external link

An external link connects via hyperlink to an outside source located elsewhere on the Internet.

To establish an external link:

When adding (or editing) an entry, supply a url to the appropriate targeted link.

In this instance, the url "http://weather.gov" has been added (as below).

When selecting the hotlink "Adding an external link"...

...a new browser page is spawned and the calendar user sees the site appear (as below).

Note: Designers could elect to use the url as the summary statement... many prefer to show an actual url in lieu of words that form the hotlink. Designer preference encouraged!

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e. compile

The compile function in the Calendar Tool allows users to gather together dates into one .txt file suitable for downloading, saving or printing.

To use the compile function, select "Compile entries" in either "View" mode or "Designer Options" mode. Note: When in "Designer Options" mode, a download function is enabled.

The "Compile Calendar Entries" page appears. Set your preferences and select "Compile" (as below).

With "View" tab forward, all entries in the selected range appear.

With "Designer Options" tab forward, the ability to download the results of the compile is enabled...

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One of the easiest ways to maintain a large range of calendar dates when using the WebCT calendar tool is to import dates (instead of adding them one by one) into the calendar. For instance, if standard dates exist for a course that you are running time and again, you can use the compile tool to "grab" the dates - then download the file, make changes to the dates in the file, upload the adjusted information and import into the calendar tool where the new dates will take hold.

a. download

Make sure the "Designer Options" tab is forward, then perform a compile on the range of dates you wish to "capture".

Select the "Download" hotlink button.

A dialogue box will prompt you as to what you wish to do with the file. In this example, the user elects to download the file to the local computer. (Your computer's image might appear different than this... just transpose appropriately!)

You'll be prompted to save the file locally. Direct where you wish to save the file to, rename it if you want (default name is always "calendar.txt") and select "Save" (as below).

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b. change dates

Open the downloaded .txt file using a text editor.

The code that the calendar tool understands is what the file is comprised of...

Note the code - always starts with a colon ( : ); followed by the date (day/month/year); followed by a comma (,); followed by the summary statement; if there is no internal or external link then follows 5 commas (,,,,,) and if an internal and/or external link is present then (,,internal page number,,,) or (,external link,,,,) link; followed by the detail statement.

Internal links are formed as below... (note: bringing internal links from one course into a different course will not work as the links are developed internally inside WebCT and are course specific!)

External links are formed as below...

Regular links (with no internal or external links) are formed as below...

And if using the start and end times feature...

the code will look like this... (,,,start time,end time,detail)

So, changes can be made...

For instance, the February day dates have been changed (as below) and the file saved as "calendar_adj.txt"

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c. upload

Upload the file into the course "My-Files" area. In this example, a sub-folder entitled "Calendar_Files" has been created to facilitate organization.

Note: You can also upload the file directly out of the "Import entries" area.

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d. import changed dates

To import the changed entries, select "Import entries"...

The "Import From File" page shows - select "Browse"...

The "File Browser" page appears. Select the radio button corresponding to the appropriate file (in this case "calendar_adj.txt" located in the sub-folder "Calendar_Files").

At the bottom of the "File Browser" page, select "Add selected"...

The file is now "in place" for the import. Select "Import"...

The "Import Confirmation" page appears. Confirm that the adjustments are what you want and select "Continue" (at the bottom of the page). (Note: In this example, the "On This Day in Music" facts are now totally off! But this is just an example...)

After selecting "Continue", the newly added dates are displayed (as below).

Note: When compiling and downloading private entries, those entries are imported back in to the calendar as public entries. Something to think about!

Good luck!

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