Scheduling Messages and Reports in Moodle

One of the main features of Badiu MReport is the scheduling system. It involves scheduling the execution of a report to be sent by email or to send a message to users, such as notifying students who have not accessed the Moodle course or environment.

     The operation is simple. When navigating a report and setting up the schedule, it is programmed to be executed on a future date. Once a message or report is scheduled, it will be executed automatically on the scheduled date. In this way, the tutor can plan the messages that should be sent to students before the course starts.

    To create a scheduled agenda, it is necessary to define the following important settings:

  • Action
  • Recipient / Message
  • Execution Date

Action
     The agenda's action defines its purpose. There are two action alternatives:

  • Send report
  • Send message to users filtered in the report

The first alternative sends the filtered report to one or several defined email addresses. The second sends a message to all users filtered in the report. The first alternative can be used to notify the course coordinator / tutor about the list of absent or underperforming students. The second alternative can be used to send a standard message to these students.

Recipient / Message
The recipient can be defined manually or automatically. Manually, just set a list of comma-separated emails that the message should be sent to. In the case of the action to send a message to each user filtered in the report, the defined email list receives a copy of the message sent along with the list of users receiving the message.

The other way to define the recipient is to select the user profile in the course. For example, if the tutor profile is chosen, users enrolled in the course with this profile will receive the filtered report. If the report contains information from more than one course, the tutor for each course will only receive data from their course.

In addition to the recipient, it is also necessary to configure the message. This setup depends on the type of action. If the action is to send a report, the message is optional. If defined, it will compose the content of the email body and the report will be attached below. If the action is to send a message to users filtered in the report, the message will be mandatory. The message to be sent to the users must be defined. The message can have expressions that will be replaced at the time of execution. Expressions allow customizing the message for each user. Consult here the list of expressions.

 

Execution Date
The execution date defines whether the agenda should be executed routinely or on a specific date. Routine execution is an execution that repeats several times. A specific date is executed only once. Routine execution can be periodic (daily, weekly, and monthly) or at an interval of time. The latter requires the definition of a time interval, which can be set in minutes, hours, days, and months. If the interval is defined as two days, the agenda will be executed every two days.

     In the definition of the date, there is also the possibility to configure the period in which the agenda should be executed. The execution period is important when dealing with a routine agenda. For example, an agenda that should be executed every week can be limited to being processed only during a two-month period.

Final Considerations

To explore the agenda configuration in more detail, click here to see the description of each form field that makes up the universe of the configuration.

To use the scheduling system efficiently, it is necessary to be clear about the monitoring rules of Moodle. Thus, you can create global agendas instead of repeating the same agenda in various courses. For example, if the criterion is that students who have not yet completed the course and have not accessed it for 7 days are considered absent, instead of creating an agenda with this rule in each course, a single global agenda can be created that encompasses all courses. From the global rules, it is possible to create a few agendas that monitor all active courses in Moodle.

To comment on this post or to share any questions or suggestions, visit the MReport discussion forum at Badiu Community