The Moodle Calendar Export Issue

In my quest for delivering solutions that help students GET on track, and STAY on track (one of the biggest challenges in my own academic career, right up there with "life getting in the way," but that's another story), I have spent many hours over a number of years trying to design an elegant method for instructors to sync a calendar from a course they are teaching in Moodle to a calendar that more students tend to actually use, such as Google Calendar.

I'll boil it down here: You're taking 3 or 4 classes, each with specific due dates and times for various assignments, quizzes, forum posts, etc. That sounds pretty typical, right? What is also typical for students - especially lots of Community College students? Life getting in the way. They need the ability to see all of the events they need to do in the context of all of the things they want to do. If you have ever missed an important deadline because you got caught up in a fun, but less important activity, you know what I'm talking about. And with the easy mobility of cloud-based calendars on our smartphones, we really are running out of excuses. And no, the dog really didn't eat your homework, because we all use Google Docs, right?

Every time I visit this Moodle-Google Calendar project, I discover tiny glimpses of progress in Moodle, but no complete solution. One aspect I really wish would come about relates to the fact that the Moodle Calendar export still seems to relate only to a user account, with no option to tie to events within a Moodle course. From Moodle.org:

"Note that this may be more or less useful. The calendar will be relative to the Moodle user. That is, if the user who generates the URL is enrolled in several courses, it is this information that will appear in the calendar. There is no way (at this time) to generate a URL that only applies to one course."

Having that option would enable instructors to create Google (or other) calendars specific to their courses, without also including other events happening in other courses in which they are enrolled. It would also empower students to export course-specific calendars to their own Google calendar.

Isn't it time we had an "Events related to THIS course" selection?

Can we please get there, Moodle?