Calendar and deadlines – teacher's guide

1 Where to find the calendar

Course deadlines are managed on the 📅 Calendar tab of the course form (“Deadline Management”). All course items – quizzes, essays, videos, hybrid quizzes, mind maps, Alaia tasks, peer reviews and forums – appear in the same calendar.

Course→ 📅 Calendar→ Drag an item to a day

Note: the calendar only becomes active once the course has been saved. Before that, the tab shows the reminder “Save the course first, then the calendar will load here.”

2 Calendar overview

The view has two parts: on the left the “No deadline” list (items that do not have a deadline yet), on the right the monthly calendar. You change the month with the arrows ← →. The calendar opens at the month of the course's first deadline (or the current month if there are no deadlines), and today's cell is highlighted.

The deadline model at the top, items without a deadline on the left and the monthly calendar on the right, with quizzes (blue), tasks, essays and video tasks.

3 Setting a deadline

Set a deadline by dragging an item from the “No deadline” list to the calendar day you want. The item moves from the list to the chosen day in the calendar.

Grab the item (⠿)→ Drag it to a calendar day→ Drop → deadline set

When you hover over an item, you see the hint “Drag to calendar to set a deadline”. This works the same way for all item types.

4 Moving and removing a deadline

You edit deadlines that are already in the calendar directly in the calendar:

Move – drag an item in the calendar to another day; the deadline moves to the new day.
Remove – press the item's × (“Remove deadline”); the deadline is removed from the item and it returns to the “No deadline” list.

A calendar item: drag it to move it, press × to remove the deadline.

5 Item types and colours

Calendar items are colour-coded by type, so you can see at a glance what kinds of deadlines each day has.

Quiz – blue

Final Exam – purple

Essay – yellow/amber

Forum – green

Task / Task Group – orange

🎥 Video task – orange

🧪 Hybrid quiz – orange

🤝 Peer review – orange

🧠 Mind map – orange

✨ Alaia task – orange

A peer review has two deadlines: submission and review appear in the calendar as separate items (“🤝 … — submission” and “🤝 … — review”), so you can give them different days.

The final exam linked to the course is also shown in its own colour, if an exam has been linked to the course in its basic information.

✨ Alaia tasks in the calendar NEW

Alaia tasks added to topics appear in the calendar as ✨ task name; a required task has 📌 after its name. Setting, moving and removing (×) the deadline work as for the other items, and the change is copied to the Deadline field in the topic’s Alaia tasks panel. Moving the start date also moves the deadlines of Alaia tasks.

The October calendar: on 20 October the Alaia task “✨ Definition of the derivative – from secant to tangent 📌” (required) below a course task.

A required Alaia task also appears with its deadline in the student’s study calendar. An optional task does not appear in the student’s calendar, even if it has a deadline.

6 Deadline models

At the top of the calendar you choose a deadline model, which determines how deadlines are interpreted.

The deadline model is chosen at the top of the calendar.

Date – a fixed calendar day (default). The deadline is a specific date.
Relative (days from start) – the deadline is given in days from the start of the course, so the same course works for different groups at different times.
Relative from start date – as above, but counted from a given start date (set next to the model selection).

Relative models are handy when you want to reuse the deadline structure of a course in different course runs without changing the dates by hand.

📘 See also: Creating a new course →