Relative Schedules in Courses with Learning Plan

 
Overview: Enhancing Learning Plans

1 Initial Problem

By now (ILIAS 5.2.x), courses featuring the learning plan view can only be configured using fixed dates. Actually, schedule items may be equipped with some flexibility (participants may postpopne them until a latest possible date) but this doesn't fit for e-learning scenarios where individual participants might start the course years after each other.
So, what we would need are schedule items that can be configured relatively, i.e., by periods instead of dates, so the start date of a schedule item can be calculated automatically by ILIAS, depending on the date the participant started the course.

2 Conceptual Summary

Note:

• In the context of this article, the start date is supposed to be the date when the participant opened the course the first time (read event) as a member.
• There is another FW article (Relative Dates in Courses/Groups) that refers to general infrastructure for relative date specifications.
  Still, this article is necessary:
  With Kitchen Sink, date entry fields have been centralized in ILIAS, so it will be relatively easy to introduce that infrastructure.
  However: The "Timings" functionality in courses has not been handled in the context of Kitchen Sink, so this would have to be made up separately.

Subsequently, ILIAS would have to calculate individual start dates for all schedule items based on this start date and the relative periods from the learning plan configuration.
In case the relative schedule is activated, the learning plan configuration has to feature different fields and terminology:

• Date field "Start Date after Course Start (in days) instead of date field "Start Date"
• Text field "Duration (in days)" instead of date field "End Date"

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

crs/view_content/timings_timings

3.2 User Interface Details

s. Relative Dates in Courses/Groups

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

none

4 Technical Information

{The maintainer has to provide necessary technical information, e.g. dependencies on other ILIAS components, necessary modifications in general services/architecture, potential security or performance issues.}

5 Contact

• Author of the Request: Bromberger, Norbert [bromberger]
• Maintainer: Meyer, Stefan [smeyer]
• Implementation of the feature is done by: {The maintainer must add the name of the implementing developer.}

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• ...

7 Discussion

Hi Alexandra,
here come two screenshots from a customer's installation where we already implemented such a solution:

Meyer, Stefan [smeyer] Relative dates are transformed into fixed dates in the moment a user is assigned to course.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], July 03, 2017: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule it for 5.3. We would like to have a label "Personal starting time" to avoid misunderstandings (course starting time etc...).

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], July 17, 2017: Due to missing time and manpower, this feature can't make it into 5.3 and is now scheduled for release 5.4.

8 Implementation

Test Cases

Test cases completed at 2018-10-29 by Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]

• 24995 : Lernplanungsansicht mit relativen Daten aktivieren
• 25008 : Lernplanung vorgeben
• 24996 : Lernplanungsansicht mit festen Daten aktivieren 
• 25009 : Lernplanung änderbar machen 

Approval

Meyer, Stefan [smeyer] Approved on 29 Oct 2018 by Patrick Leitinger, Colin Kiegel