Scheduling an appointment - organising appointments digitally

FELIX 30-151

What you need to know

The "Appointments scheduling" course element enables the digital organisation and assignment of appointments (e.g. for the organisation of office hours or viewing of exam papers). This applies to the organisation of both face-to-face and online appointments.
If the appointments are online, you can either use external online rooms and store the URL, or use the integrated BigBlueButton(BBB) instance and integrate a BBB room directly in the scheduling.

If you want to organise consultation appointments via FELIX, we recommend copying the External link opens in a new window:course template and configuring the office hours element there as shown in these instructions.

What you have to do

  1. If you have not already done so, add the Appointments scheduling element to your course (Helpcard 30-150).

    • As described in Helpcard 30-150, in the course element you must activate the "Owner" at "Organizers" to ensure full functionality of the course element.

  2. Create an "occasion" by clicking on "Create occasion" in the upper right corner, enter a title (e.g. office hours, exam review) and configure the event according to your needs:

    • Enter a description of the appointment, if desired.

    • At "Type", leave the default setting at "Appointment finding".

    • Configuration: Under Selection of several appointments, you can specify whether students are allowed to select multiple appointments. If this is not desired, deactivate this option.

    • Configuration: Under Confirmation of appointments you can determine whether you want to confirm the appointments selected by the students. If this is not desired, then deactivate this option.

    • If you have activated "Appointment confirmation by coach/owner" in the "Configuration", you must actively confirm selected appointments later.
      To do so continue as follows:
      click on the respective event and then on "Show appointments". Initially, the appointments selected by the students will appear to you with the label "scheduled". You must then "confirm" them by clicking on "Confirm". The label "confirmed" will appear. The students will receive a confirmation email.

    • Configuration: At "Participants visible to other participants" you can determine whether participants of appointments should be visible to other students. We recommend that you deactivate this option to ensure anonymity.

    • Organizer: the persons selected here will then be displayed to the participants in the event ("Appointment with [name]"). This can be useful when appointments are created in a course that are held by multiple/different people.

    • You would like to use an external online room and name the URL to this room here? Then enter the URL of your online consultation at "Location" (for example, appointments can be found in the BigBlueButton course element, URL to alfaview room). If you want to use the integrated BigBlueButton option directly, leave this field empty.

    • Under "Max. participants", you can limit the number of people attending the event if you wish.
      If you want to organise your online appointments via the BigBlueButton integration available below, the following applies:
      The maximum number of people per event is then determined by the room template that you select below.

    • Select the desired appointment type:
      "Duration", "Start / End" or "Recurring".

    • "Duration": select a start date and time and enter the duration of the appointment in minutes. Then click on the "+" symbol to generate further appointments.
      Tip: Enter two appointments, for example appointment 1: 10.00am, duration 10 min, end 10.10am. Appointment 2 should start at 10.15am and last 10 minutes again. From the third appointment on, the system automatically calculates the duration and the break in between from the first two appointments.

    • "Start/End": Select a start and end date with time. Then click on the "+" symbol to generate further dates.

    • "Recurring": you can create recurring appointments, for example, every Wednesday. You can choose a start date and an end date.
      Tip: to add more recurring appointments, you have to finish the event first and then add another appointment.

    • At "BBB room" you can decide if you want to use a directly integrated BigBlueButton room. If this is not the case and you have already specified an external online room at "Location", then leave "No" here and "Save" and omit the next step.

      If you want to make an online appointment via the integrated "BigBlueButton", select "Yes" here and continue with the next step.

  3. Configure your integrated BBB room.

    • You can enter a welcome text that will be displayed in the BigBlueButton room as a welcome message in the chat area for all participants.

    • Under Room template, select the desired template ("Meeting" room template = up to 8 people, "Classroom" room template = up to 30 people) with the desired capacity. If you are planning a meeting with fewer than 8 people, enter the desired number of participants under "Max. participants".

    • Pre- and post-meeting time: You can define a pre-meeting time (between 0 - 30 minutes) in which the meeting can already be started by the course coaches and owners, but not by participants, e.g. to prepare a presentation. A post-meeting time (between 0 - 30 minutes) is also possible. This means that the meeting does not end automatically after the end of the appointment time, but continues for the number of minutes you define here.

    • If you want to offer several appointments in succession, it is advisable to configure a short break between the appointments. It is advisable to make sure that the appointments do not overlap (e.g. due to the pre- and post-run time).

    • The "Join meeting" button will only be visible if  the appointment has been booked by at least one participant. The room will only be accessible time of the corresponding appointment.

      To join the meeting at the corresponding time slot, you have to navigate "Back" from the appointment view in the upper left corner, to the "Event" level.

    • Save your entries.

  4. To create further occasions, click on "Back" in the upper left corner and there on "Create occasion".
    Over the cogwheel symbol you can also ...
    ... edit any event that has already been created
    ....restrict the group of participants to a specific group
    ....export a list of participants
    ....duplicate the event
    .... delete the event

    • At "Duplicate event" you can also move the already set events by a certain period of time.

  5. If you have used our course template for an office hours course, you must set the status of the course (top left) to "Published". You must also set the course to "Bookable and open offers" under Administration in the Share tab under Settings, and save it. Then share under "Without booking".

  6. Rebooking students from one appointment to another / cancelling appointments:
    It may be necessary to rebook students from one appointment to another.

    • To do this, click on the three dots for an appointment.

    • Click on "Remove user" there. Rebook the students to another appointment.

    • You can also delete an appointment at this point and thus also enable students to rebook themselves.

  7. Students will receive a confirmation email when a date is selected - you may need to first confirm the student's first selected date (if so configured).

Problems or questions?