Many university courses follow plans that involve "synchronous" course meetings (lectures, labs, etc.). E.g., a lab meets on Fridays at 1pm, the lecture meets at Tuesdays at 9am. Frequency could be more than once a week, or it might not be regular. These synchronous meetings form the structure for how the rest of the course takes place. Many universities already have these dates planned in advance (my university can give it to me in an iCal file).

Moodle activities are often tied to synchronous meetings. For example, let's say I have course lectures C1, C2, C3, etc. I want my students to arrive at lectures having read the materials. Moodle Quizzes are a great way to get them to do this, so I'll have the quiz 1 open 3 days before C1, and it will close 30 minutes before C1 starts.

Synchronous meetings are a series of calendar events defined in a category, e.g., Course lectures, Laboratories, etc. E.g., my first course lecture C1 could be 2014-11-19 from 2-3pm. I could create these events with Moodle, but likely I'd import them from an iCal.

When choosing dates for activities (quiz, homework, etc.) in Moodle, allow specifying times that are relative to existing synchronous meetings. E.g., C1 - 30 minutes, C1 - 3 days, 11pm the day before C1, etc.

A benefit of this feature would be that bulk configuration of courses would be simpler when they are re-used. A course that has its Moodle activities tied RELATIVELY to synchronous meetings could be easily re-used in another time schedule. I only need to update my synchronous meeting dates (their names should stay the same, e.g., "C1" or the "first" meeting of the category "Course lecture"). Again, importing them from iCal would be very simple.