Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Julian Hopkins -
Number of replies: 7
Hi, I hope someone can help.

In the Overview screen/tab, there are three fields that are empty, and I don't know where their information is mean to come from. These are the "From where", "What", and "What resulted?" Does anyone know what they are?

There is no detail in the relevant part of the Moodle documentation.

The final column - 'What happened?' - is populated by the notes made in the part that you access by clicking on the student name in the booked appointments.

Thanks,
Julian
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In reply to Julian Hopkins

Re: Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
Hi,
Your question made me investigate smile .

What? {what/scheduler}
    = Comments added to the slot (in the slot settings) = contents of  Comments {comments/scheduler}

What resulted? {whatresulted/scheduler}
    IF you turn on grading in the Scheduler's settings, then Grade info will display in the "What resulted?" column

What happened? {whathappened/scheduler}
    = Notes for appointment (visible to student) (cf. {appointmentnote/scheduler} in the slot settings)
    But also - if in the Scheduler's activity settings you specify confidential notes for teacher/s only, or both types of notes, then (also) the confidential teacher notes will display in the "What happened?" column (following the for-student notes)
    
cf. the attached screen from the Overview tab:




When you view the particular appointment with these details in, it looks like this:







I think I would have two suggestions for the Developer based on this analysis (assuming that it's complete):

1) Re-naming the strings in the Overview table in such a way that they correspond to the various settings:

"What?" => "Comments (to this slot)"

"What resulted?" => "Grade (if activated)"

"What happened?" => "Notes for appointment"

So as not to confuse "Comments" and "Notes" found in the various places, perhaps "Information about this slot" could be applied in the slot setting and then as the Overview column heading instead of "Comment".

Perhaps instead "Grade (if activated)" we could use "Grade for appointment" - since various grading methods may be used in the scheduler, such as use average grade for calculation in the Gradebook  - I have not exactly checked how all this behaves, though.


2) The CSS for for-student notes vs confidential teacher notes should differentiate between these two types of notes (e.g. different color/ font style, or indeed a prefix like: "Visible to student and teacher" vs "Visible to teacher only").


It's possible to customise English (and other) language strings on our Moodles to achieve the above effect but I believe changes in standardising the strings would be useful globally? I also think the posited CSS change cannot be easily done since no css classes are used with these notes in the Overview display - the teacher seems to be forced to remember to include by hand the relevant "prefix" for the confidential notes.

Hope this helps. My analysis is NOT based on the latest version of Scheduler but on v. 3.5.1
2018112602 (Moodle 3.6.10)  , but I think much of it should be still accurate enough.

Kind regards.
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In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
PS. The "From Where" column carries any data from the User's full profile > Optional > Department field.

Below is a screen from the user's profile edit page:



Here's how this info will show on the Scheduler's Overview page:




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In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

PS2. With the Scheduler set to allow more than 1 booking (e.g. student allowed to book 1 meeting at a time), and if grading - the grade displayed in the "What resulted?" coumn of the Overview is the grade awarded for that particular appointment.

Below is a screenshot from the latest Scheduler 3.7.0 (2019120200) in Moodle 3.9.6 :

BUT - beware of the likely bug in the Scheduler in reporting the calculated mean of grades from several appointments:



Here is a Gradebook screenshot where 3,5 / 35% (out of max. 10 set) is correctly reported:


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In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Julian Hopkins -
Thanks for the very detailed response Przemek! Really appreciate it smile
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In reply to Julian Hopkins

Re: Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
OK, thanks.
Regarding grading based on multiple appointments, I just discovered that the problem may be with the display of the calculated mean:

- there are no decimal points displayed in the "Total grade" and "Grade in gradebook" cells - although the mean itself IS calculated ,

BUT

- only the integer part of the grade is shown, the decimal points are sliced off, the graded is NOT rounded in any way, as shown below:






Perhaps a simple solution would be to adjust the code where this display criteria are set and allow, say, two decimal points, as with most grading defaults in Moodle. If I make further progress, I'll report again.

I have recently discovered a similar issue with quiz attempt reviews and percentages .

Cheers,

Przemek
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In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
By tweaking the public function format_grade
in
/mod/scheduler/renderer.php
and commenting line 133

// $grade = ( int) $grade;

I was able to force the correct display of the mean grade for both students and teachers opening the Scheduler:









Now the value borrowed from the Gradebook would need rounding, which I haven't figured out yet.

Likely that this function
public function render_scheduler_totalgrade_info
might need tweaking - for cases where a numerical grade was sent to Gradebook.

I also would not be sure which variable to apply for the decimal points, so for the moment I have stopped exploring further.
After all I'm not a programmer ;) .

At least the error discovered can be patched with a short edit of one file, or so it seems.

Regards.


PS. BTW -  https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.integer.php  - this helped me:


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In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: Overview screen - what are "From where", "What", and "What resulted?"

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
To correctly render both numbered grades and grading with scales, I have finally settled for the following, I reproduce lines 126 to 150 of the code in renderer.php, and have added bold to my changes:

$result = '';
if ($scaleid == 0 || is_null($grade) ) {
// Scheduler doesn't allow grading, or no grade entered.
if (!$short) {
$result = get_string('nograde');
}
} else {
// $grade = ( int) $grade; // Commented out, or rather moved to l. 143 - PK 2021-05-25
if ($scaleid > 0) {
// Numeric grade.
$grade = round($grade,2); // Added, PK 2021-05-25
$result .= $grade;
if (strlen($grade) > 0) {
$result .= '/' . $scaleid;
}
} else {
// Grade on scale.
$grade = ( int) $grade; // Added, or rather moved from l. 133 - PK 2021-05-25
if ($grade > 0) {
$levels = $this->get_scale_levels(-$scaleid);
if (array_key_exists($grade, $levels)) {
$result .= $levels[$grade];
}
}
}

This seems to work well, and I  may want to suggest it on the Tracker.

HOWEVER -  while comparing what Scheduler claims to be Gradebook's final grade outputs for the Teacher vs the Student , under such condtions:
- scales used for grading (e.g. Incompetent-Competent)
- mean aggregate selected for grading multiple appointments,

then

a combination of Competent + Not yet incompetent yields two different overall results :/ :
- Not yet competent - on the student's page ( /mod/scheduler/view.php?id=n - the value is taken from the Gradebook here, and I think this IS the correct interpretation)
- Competent on the Teacher's page (/mod//scheduler/view.php?what=viewstudent&id=... etc) - this calculation seems to be done within Scheduler, rather than taken from the Gradebook. which I think is understandable, but renders an incorrect result.

Anyway. this last discrepancy in aggregation reports seems like another bug to be squashed in Scheduler at some point.
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