Drew Online Community Calendar
The Drew Online Community Calendar is an evolution of Word, an online calendar system created for the Office of Student Activities at Ramapo College of New Jersey. It is intended to allow students and faculty a simple central location for finding on-campus events.
The calendar's default view is entitled "Next 5 Days" and it shows events for today and the following 4 days. This view is rarely found in events calendars, but it is more convenient than the typical "one week" view as it allows users to see what's coming up regardless of the current day of the week.
Month view is the preferred view for many users because it allows them to see at a glance what's coming up in the long term. The view is especially useful when viewing a single category, such as an academic calendar.
Year view, while not useful for looking up individual events, can be useful for a user who intends to skip around or look for an event that's been archived.
On the administrative side, an administrator can see all upcoming events and all past events. In addition, they can see what events have been approved for posting, denied for posting, or "pending" events which have been neither denied nor approved. When setting up the DOCC, the website administrator can set the default user permission set to require room booking approval, content approval, both, or neither.
Adding an event is as simple as filling out a form. Users enter a title, date, time, and location, as well as various other optional information. Some of the notable features are recurring events (pictured), off-campus events with links to Google Maps, image attachment, and categorization.
The latest version of the DOCC will include some minor enhancements to the add/edit event UI, including a clear delineation between what information is required and what information is optional. Furthermore, we're working on methods for improving the user experience entering dates and times. As pictured above, users now enter dates by clicking on a link labeled "Calendar" and picking the date off an interactive popup calendar.
We could not find an appropriate visual analogue for entering time (a clock would be cumbersome), so we did the next best thing. We turned the time fields back into simple text fields and use JavaScript to try to interpret the text to figure out what time the user means. You can use the fields below to try out the algorithm. If the JavaScript fails to recognize the time you entered, the field will turn red.
For more information, please see the Drew Online Community Calendar at http://www.drew.edu/docc/.