Imagine this situation: you just imported your full schedule for this semester into your main Google Calendar when you decide make some changes to your courses or want to switch to an iCal feed. In this and many other cases it would be nice if Google provided any form of undo import option. Unfortunately there is no automated way of doing this just yet, so manually deleting all events seems to be the only option. Somebody came up to me today asking if there is any way of solving this problem, so i figured something out. All you need is the original ics file and a simple text editor.

Every student at Delft University of Technology and possibly many more students around the world know this problem. You have to enroll for course in Blackboard to get access to all the material, but once you passed the course there is no easy way to unenroll. After a few years of studying your course list seems to be neverending. Fortunately one of my fellow student Alex Nederlof created a little tool to solve this problem, just follow 4 easy steps and you are unenrolled (making the course disappear from you list). Do note that this relates to unenrolling in Blackboard terms, it has got nothing to do with actual course enrollment (for which the university in Delft uses Osiris)

Follow this link to go to the tool

Update: Unfortunately this tool only works for courses that already have the Blackboard Unenroll tool enabled. Therefore it doesn’t really add anything to the functionality already available

Yesterday we delivered version 1.4 of he TU Delft MyTimetable application. This release contains some new and improved features. Also some problems have been solved. I will summarize most notable changes.

Since our MyTimetable Blackboard module officially launched back in February the most criticized feature has been the PDF export. The current PDF export looks a little chaotic and does not present a clear view of the schedule. During the last week i finally came to improving this part. The functional implementation is now complete so i have been able to generate a first preview. Please note that the PDFs design still needs to be improved, but this requires some feedback. So please take a look at the preview and then let me know things how you think about it. The work-in-progress preview can be found here. Please leave your feedback down here in the comments or send an e-mail to tom@eveoh.nl. Also note that any other feedback on the module is really appreciated. Update 15:55: The updated version now dynamically adjusts based on activity times. An updated preview can be found here Update 03/09: The announcement on Blackboard only credits me for the application. Marco Krikke, Mike Noordermeer and Maarten van der Beek also deserve credit for MyTimetable

De afgelopen twee dagen was ik op de conferentie SISLink 2010 “Schakelen in de keten”. Op deze conferentie waren zowel leveranciers als gebruikers van studentinformatiesystemen aanwezig. Er werden vooral veel ervaringen uitgewisseld en als mede-ontwikkelaar van het My Timetable building block voor de TU Delft mocht ik dan ook een presentatie van een uur afleveren. Mijn presentatie is te vinden op slideshare:

A few days ago we delivered version 1.1 of the My Timetable Blackboard module to the Delft University of Technology. The module is now compatible with Blackboard 9.1 and some minor problems have been solved. The new version will be available on Blackboard soon.

Enige tijd geleden schreef ik al een blogje over een manier om Osiris wat efficienter te kunnen gebruiken, helaas heeft de TU hier tot op heden nog niets mee gedaan. Ondertussen spelen er ook een aantal andere problemen.

Sinds de invoer van Osiris bij de TU Delft wordt er geklaagd over de onhandigheid en tijd/aantal kliks die het kost om op bepaalde pagina’s te komen. Vandaag kreeg ik van Robin van den Berg een tip die werkt als een workaround voor dat probleem. Hierdoor is het mogelijk om dingen als laatste tentamenresultaten en de inschrijfpagina voor tentamens met 1 klik te bereiken.

At the start of the first semester the TU Delft started using a new system for all timetables. From the schedulers point of view this system was a big improvement, but unfortunately the interface for students (http://timetables.tudelft.nl/) lacked some features students would like to have. Back in October i started working on an alternative interface system together with Maarten van der Beek, Marco Krikke and Mike Noordermeer. Our target was to make a system that would work intuitive, integrate with blackboard and save preferences for later visits. Furthermore exporting to digital calendars was a big must-have. Yesterday we started doing the final tests on the system, we are still looking for testers. Send us a mail at roostercie@ch.tudelft.nl if you are interested. Meanwhile here is an overview of the new interface i would like to share with you.