Tue, 25 Aug 2009
Appointment Booking System.
I’ve been trying to arrange meetings/consultations sessions with students and it’s not always possible because of our different timetables. I’m now trying to find a free online appointment booking system that integrates with Google Calendars to serve two purposes:
- Allow students to ‘book’ a meeting slot with me based on mine and their available meeting times without much hassle.
- Automatically ‘pull’ info from my Google Calendar to determine when I’m free/when I’m not free + ‘push’ info to my Google Calendar to automatically update my schedule for me.
I don’t think anyone has come up with something like this yet so if any computing whiz wants to work on this, I’d say go for it (and let me know when you do come up with this so that I can use it! It’s my brainchild after all!). You can most likely sell it to companies/organisations that need this service when you’re done creating the program for it.
iCal can sync with Google Calendar.
Yup, but I try to keep my Mac for my personal stuff/non-work purposes. My work computer’s a PC and I want the flexibility of cloud computing in the event I need to update my schedule at home, hence the use of Google Docs.
If the students have the admin rights to add stuff into your calendar, it also means that they have the admin rights to delete stuff from your calendar. That includes whatever you put there or what other students have put in.
If you want to limit access rights to solve the above problems, google calendar will not be the suitable frame work for you, but other CMS can.
If you want to stick to Google calendar, you could do what my prof does. Put his google calendar on display on his website, and appointments are booked via email. See http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~bleong/calendar.htm
Thanks for the tip re: other CMSes and what your prof does. I think I’m moving toward doing the latter until I find/create (!) the system I want.
I’m thinking out loud…
Google Calendar already allows you to do what you suggested provided 1) all users are on Gmail/Gcal, 2) you give them “make changes to events” access.
You might be able to sent up one Gcal to mirror a second calendar and allow student access to the second calendar only.
You can then be alerted of changes in the second calendar over the air to, say, your phone.
That’s a good option. But I want to remove the hassle of students having to own Google Accounts cos not all of them may have one.
Basically I just want it to be as simple to create appointments as possible. But on hindsight, it might not be necessary – I think students will not take the initiative to create appointments with teachers unless:
It’s a life or death situation e.g. going to get retained or possibility of failing, or
They’re really motivated/self-directed learners
These students are few and far between, and the current system of e-mail seems to work, so I’m temporarily shelving this project aside for now. If need be I’ll come back to it in the future.
Have a look at tungle.me – they choose an available timeslot – free
Bookfresh.com – has distinct advantages if you want to set fixed time slots – but pay about $30 a month after 30 day trial.
Setster.com – straightforward and a free version
scheduleonce.com – probably the easiest within google itself