Improvements to Calendar Files from the Course Schedule
Calendars are central to the lives of most working adults and most students. We need to know when and how our time is scheduled. Having an up-to-date calendar is key to success in academic life.
For many years, students have been able to download calendar events for everything on their CoursePlus course schedules. During this time, the CoursePlus team received occasional feedback on how to make these calendar files more useful. Based on this feedback, the team recently made a number of changes to how the calendar event (.ics) files you download from the main course content page work.
Previously, a single event on the course schedule would have a single calendar event file. This calendar event would have a start date of the date on which the item became available in CoursePlus, and an end date of the date on which the item was due. The problem with this approach is that most items become available on the first day of class and may not be due until days or weeks later. This caused events to run across multiple days or weeks in an individual calendar program (Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar). This created a lot of visual noise that students would inevitably have to manually correct.
The CoursePlus team changed the way each calendar event file with a start and due date works. Instead of one file per event, there are now two files: one for the start date that lasts for an hour after the event starts, and another for the due date that lasts for an hour before the event is due. This means that you’ll get a “due date” event that’s separate and appears on your calendar in the hour before the event is due. If an assignment is due at 5pm, the calendar event runs from 4pm to 5pm on that day. This change means that there are no more course-related events spanning days or weeks in your calendar program.
The files also have “due date” in the file title so you can easily determine which event files are for the start of an event (or something like a lecture becoming available on the course schedule), and which are actual due date events. This makes adding only due dates to your calendar much simpler.
Another change made is that the individual .ics (calendar) files you download now have more descriptive names that reflect the titles of their corresponding events on the course schedule. No more guessing which .ics files match which events on the course schedule.
We hope that these changes make working with course calendar event file easier for you. As always, if you have questions about these changes, please reach out to the CTL Help team, and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.