The calendar in Totara Learn displays the following events:
- Global: These site wide events are created by administrators and are viewable in all courses.
- Course: These events are either created by trainers or are a result of setting closing dates for activities such as assignments, quizzes, and repeating chat sessions. Course events are only viewable by course participants.
- Groups: These events are created by trainers and are only viewable by members of a group.
- User: These are personal events that a user can create and are only viewable by the user.
Calendar Admin settings
The following settings can be changed by a Site administrator in Site Administration > Appearance > Calendar.
| Setting | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Calendar type | The admin can choose a default calendar type for the whole site here (the default is Gregorian). | Trainers can override the calendar type via Course administration > Edit settings and individuals can edit their calendar type within their user profile. |
| Admins see all | Specify whether site administrators see all calendar events or just those that apply to themselves. | This is set at the site level and cannot be overridden by an individual site administrator. |
| Time display format | Choose whether a 12 or 24 hour format is used in time specific events. | This setting can be overridden by individual via their profile within user Preferences. |
| Start of week | Select the first working day of the week. | |
| Weekend days | Select the non-working days of the week. | Weekend days are shown in a different colour. |
| Days and events to look ahead | This setting determines how many days and events are listed in the Upcoming Events block. | If the Upcoming Events block becomes too long you can reduce the number of days and events to look ahead. |
| Enable calendar export | When enabled users will be able to export their calendar entries and configure external calendar applications to consume calendar events directly from Totara. | Calendars can be exported into systems such as Outlook and Google Calendar. |
| Enable custom date range export of calendar | Enable custom date range to be defined when exporting calendars, | - |
| Days to look ahead and back | A custom range of dates, such as a term or year, may be set as a calendar export option. | - |
| Calendar export salt | The calendar export salt is a random string of characters used for improving of security of authentication tokens used for exporting of calendars. | - |
| Show source information for iCal events | If enabled, the subscription name and link will be shown for iCal-imported events. | - |
Click Save changes to save your settings.
Using the Calendar
The Calendar block allows you to access the calendar to view, edit and create events. You can also export the calendar from Totara as a URL or iCal download so that you can import it to another calendar you might use.
The Events key acts as both a key and allows you to hide certain types of events. For example, clicking on the link Hide global events will mean that the calendar will only display course, group and user events. This is a display only feature, and will not hide the events for anyone else.
To access other calendar features you must first enter the calendar, this is done by clicking the month and year (i.e. for the screenshot above April 2017).
Add an event
Activities with date settings (such as quizzes, assignments and seminar events) will automatically be populated into the calendar as course events. You can manually add other types of events to the calendar, the type of events you can add depends on your access level as trainers will be able to add Course or User events, but learners can only add User events. A user event is unique to that specific user (i.e. you), so you might want to use this top add in meetings or reminders for yourself. To do this follow the steps below:
- In the Calendar block click the month to enter the calendar.
- Click the New event button, located to the right just above the calendar.
- Enter the event type, title, description and date settings. Mandatory fields are marked with an asterisk (* ).
- When you are done click Save changes.
The event will now display in the calendar.
Export
You may wish to export the calendar so that you can import it into another calendar system; this can be done as either a URL or a downloadable .ics file. To generate an export follow these steps:
- In the Calendar block click the month to enter the calendar.
- Click the Export calendar button, located under the calendar.
- Chose what you want to export, mandatory fields are marked with an asterisk (* ).
- Click either Get calendar URL (for a link) or Export (for a file download).
Once you have generated a URL or .ics file you can then use it in your preferred external calendar system.
Manage subscriptions (import)
As well as exporting content to other calendars you can also import from another calendar, either using a URL or .ics file. To import a calendar follow the steps below:
- In the Calendar block click the month to enter the calendar.
- Click the Manage subscriptions button, located under the calendar.
- Complete the settings such as specifying whether you are using a URL or .ics file. Mandatory fields are marked with an asterisk (* ).
- Once you are done click Add to import the calendar.
After you have imported one or more calendars then you will be able to access them via the Manage subscriptions button. The calendars will appear in a table at the top of the page, and you can change the update frequency then click the button Update or delete the calendar with the Remove button.
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The Totara Academy has a course dedicated to Localisation in Totara Learn.
