Creating and using Delivery Schedules

What is a delivery schedule?

A Delivery Schedule is a set of rules that defines at a course or unit level, what dates your activities and units are opened or closed for access by your students. This allows you to emulate "terms" or "blocks" within the Student Portal so students can't jump ahead of the content you wish to deliver.

Setting up a delivery schedule

Modules

Starting with your Modules, make sure you've got Activities and at least one Pathway configured, then head over to the Delivery Schedule tab.  From here, you can choose the "Add Delivery Schedule" button at the bottom to begin creating a schedule.

You will be prompted to give your schedule a name, in this case we've gone with "Default" and you will be able to see the activities in each pathway listed, as below.

At the unit level, start and end dates are considered relative.  Values you enter here get offset relative to the start date of the unit within a course.  Here, we've entered some start and end periods, then clicked the "Save changes" button to apply these.

For example, if a unit starts 10 days after the course start, and an activity starts 5 days after that unit begins, the activity will fall 15 days after the student enrols.

On the "Activities" tab, you will need to select "Activities will follow the delivery schedule" option from the ordering options.

Courses

Setting up a delivery schedule for a course is similar to setting up for a module; the major difference being that you also need to select which of the module's schedules you're referring to here.  This allows you to have multiple schedules at the module level (e.g. if the module is in many courses or a "fast track" version)

The rest of the process is similar, entering a number of Days, Weeks or Months to offset the Start/End dates from the timetable or enrolment.

On the "Units" tab, you will also need to select the "Units will follow the delivery schedule" option.

Previewing your Delivery Schedule

Clicking the "convert to dates" button at the bottom of this table allows you to project the delivery schedule from a specified start date.  In this example which is missing a schedule for several units, you can see that the units  and activities with a schedule have start and end dates calculated from the given start date

Using a Delivery Schedule

When you've configured your course and module(s) to have a Delivery Schedule set up, it's time to use it on a timetable.  On the "Units and Pathways" screen, there will be a dropdown to apply a Delivery Schedule to the timetable.

As with the course and module screens, the "Preview Schedule" button here shows the start and finish dates for all units and activities, using the timetable item's start date as the origin.  In the case of an "always open" timetable, individual enrolment start dates will be used, and the "Select Start Date" input can be used to calculate for different students.

With some students enrolled, they can log into their course page in the Student Portal and will see something like the following:

Individual activities can expire, in which case the text updates

Entire units can also expire

Extending a Delivery Schedule

Admins can manually override the status of a unit in a Delivery Schedule, for example if something has expired, you can click the "unlock" button in the Progress Tracker

This makes the unit open until manually changed, and is indicated in the Student Portal

For a more automated process, students can request extra time on scheduled items that have expired.  Students can click "request time extension" and are then given the list of units and activities they can extend

Extension Fees

There can optionally be a fee for this extension; on the course or module page for the enrolment, you can set the "fee per day"

This will then be applied and shown to the student when requesting an extension:

Requesting an extension generates a Payment Request that the student can pay to get additional access to their course.