What is gTurnos?

gTurnos is a block for Moodle, which manages the delivery of turns. It considers necessities of teachers and students.
The idea was born by the necessity of computerizing the delivery of turns process for in-class exams at my university. Until now, this process was managed using a list (piece of paper posted in the door) in which the students had to sign up manually. This old process was obviously uncomfortable, and the resulting list was not compact and frequently unbalanced.
gTurnos allows to perform this process by Internet, and always provides compact lists where, as in queue, those users that register first have higher priority.

How does it work?

The usage of gTurnos is very easy. The teacher configures the in-class exam period(s) through a web interface:

The students choose his favourite time and turn (as soon as possible, or as late as possible). The algorithm calculates his date dynamically. Once the registering process is confirmed, a provisional date is shown in the main course page.

In his menu, the teacher can see a preview of the turn allocation list, his preferences, add new blocks, …

When the teacher decides that the inscription period has finished, he sets the list as definitive clicking on a link in the menu. After that, the student will see his date as definitive.

Supported versions:

gTurnos was developed under Moodle 1.6.2, and it was successfully tested under the latest existing versions: 1.6.3 and 1.7.
It requires MySQL and PHP. There is a version of gTurnos to PHP 5 and another one to PHP 4.

Download:

You can download gTurnos (GPL) clicking on the download link on the top of the page, that will send you to the project in sourceforge.net.
You can use gTurnos in English or in Spanish. The package includes user manuals in both languages.
If you want to know more about gTurnos, you can download the project documentation (in Spanish, under the GFDL license).

Contact:

If you are using or you are thinking in using gTurnos, you have any suggestion, problem, … please, contact me by e-mail. THANKS!.
I hope gTurnos can be useful for you!.

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank Ismael Casado for helping me with the translation into English; and Jose Manuel Sevilleja for designing such a cool logo.
I wish also thank José Centeno (dissertation’s tutor) for his help, an also to all the people involved in the Moodle project.