[LON-CAPA-users] Online Exams and Timezones

[Mills, Douglas G]

Thanks Stuart, as always!

Doug

Douglas Mills
Director of Instructional Technology
Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois







On 6/29/16, 10:49 AM, "lon-capa-users-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org on behalf
of Stuart Raeburn" <lon-capa-users-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org on behalf of
raeburn at msu.edu> wrote:

>Doug,
>
>> ... So for example, we have a slot from 4:30 to 7:30  for an online
>> exam, Central Daylight Savings Time.  Will a student  in the Eastern
>> Timezone see that listed at 5:30-8:30 OR do they  simply need to
>> take into account that the timezone the server is in  and make their
>> own adjustment?
>
>For items in the Course Contents screen which use slot access, and for
>which the student already has a reservation (either an
>instructor-assigned slot or a student-selectable slot), the status
>column will show something like "Reserved - next open in x hours",
>between the open date and the slot start time, and "Reserved - ends in
>x minutes", between the slot start time and the slot end time.
>
>The "Reservations" screen for the student will show the slot
>description for each resource for which a slot is assigned.
>
>If the description field is empty, then LON-CAPA will show the slot
>name, followed by: "From $start to $end", where $start and $end will
>be the start and end times of the particular slot.
>
>The timezone used when displaying the date/time for $start and $end is
>from lonlocal::gettimezone().  The routine looks for a timezone
>according to the following order (in course context):
>
>(a) Timezone for course (from course settings)
>(b) Timezone for course's domain (from domain configuration) if (a) not
>set.
>(c) Timezone of server hosting user session if neither (a) nor (b) set.
>
>You could also explicitly include the start and end times of the slot
>in the slot description, and you could choose which time zone to use
>when creating the description.
>
>If you wanted students in different time zones to see slot start and
>end times in the time zone appropriate for their current location then
>one way you could do that currently would be to use multiple
>student-selectable slots, one for each time zone you want to support,
>and explicitly include the time zone in the slot description.  The
>idea would be that students then sign up by choosing the slot
>appropriate for their time zone.
>
>Internally LON-CAPA stores all dates/times as UNIX timestamps (i.e.,
>seconds since UNIX epoch), so the different slots would all actually
>have the identical start times internally, it's just the description
>(which you would set) which would be different.
>
>
>Stuart Raeburn
>LON-CAPA Academic Consortium
>
>
>Quoting "Mills, Douglas G" <dmills at illinois.edu>:
>
>> HI All,
>>
>> Can anyone clarify for me if Lon-Capa takes into account the
>> timezone of an online student for things like signing up for a slot
>> to take an exam?  So for example, we have a slot from 4:30 to 7:30
>> for an online exam, Central Daylight Savings Time.  Will a student
>> in the Eastern Timezone see that listed at 5:30-8:30 OR do they
>> simply need to take into account that the timezone the server is in
>> and make their own adjustment?  Thanks!
>>
>> Doug
>>
>> Douglas Mills
>> Director of Instructional Technology
>> Department of Chemistry
>> University of Illinois
>
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