Similar to the Group choice activity (mod/choicegroup) this Dataform field plugin allows students to join a group of their choice. The field offers a few additional features. It allows the instructor to use existing course groupings and groups or create new ones from within the Dataform activity. By settings, students may be allowed to join more than one group and/or change their group selection. Each group is represented in the activity by an entry. With additional entry fields the instructor can add further details on each group, e.g. details of the project assignment of that group. A beta version will be released to git in the next few days. A quick illustration is attached.
Itamar Tzadok
Discussions started by Itamar Tzadok
Dataform 2.8 and 2.7.3 allow us to set role based access rules on field view and update. The capabilities are based on the entry capabilities and so you can have different field access settings for the different types of entries (own, group, any, anonymous, early, late).
The feature requires the block_dataformaccessfield plugin. The plugin is available from git at https://github.com/itamart/moodle-block_dataformaccessfield. It is awaiting approval in the Moodle plugin repo and should be available from there soon.
The field access rule can be assigned to all or some of the fields in the activity. It can also be assigned to particular entries by selecting a filter or specifying search criteria. The filter is effectively a way to assign the rule to a field based on the content of that field or some other fields. For instance, we can prevent further updates of a particular field if the entry state has changed to some state by setting a search criterion which will find all entries with that entry state.
An interesting application of the field access rule is the ability to make some fields available to some users but not to others. For instance, we can create a Dataform assignment activity where students submit some work (online text, file upload etc.) and two (or more) graders evaluate the work and assign marks on several aspects as in a rubric. We can add field access rules to prevent the graders from updating the submission fields, and prevent students from updating the evaluation fields. If we want each grader to see only his/her evaluation so as not to be influenced by the other evaluations, we can add field rules to that effect. We can also allow the students to enter their self-assessment on the evaluated aspects. This could allow students to rethink their work before submission. After submission they would be able to compare their self-assessment with the graders evaluation.
All that works together with the Dataform grading to the effect that multiple evaluations can be aggregated via a formula calculation and sent to the gradebook.
Examples and demonstrations underway. Please give it a try and share your experience.
The concept of global field has been suggested at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=257389#p1116382. This would be a field that would be available to all Dataforms on the site and whose whose definition could be maintained globaly for all Dataform instances.
The thread cited above offers one viable use case. Another possible use case comes from an experimental field I'm currently working on. This is an SQL query field that allows for generating and adding to an entry data from anywhere in Moodle by means of an SQL query. In the field settings you create the SQL query, you set the entry reference element (e.g. userid, groupid) and the patterns for the retrieved data. Then you can add the patterns to the view templates and the data will be displayed in the entries. So for instance, you can fetch any additional user info as needed. Or, course info. And so on. An interesting side effect is displaying general info fixed or dynamic by an SQL query that doesn't access any table. For instance the sql query could be:
SELECT NOW() as now
and this would generate for display the current time.
Now, the sql query field relates to the global field concept in that creating global sql query fields could be a convenient way to allow Dataform creators to include general Moodle info in Dataform instances without having to recreate the query or deal with sql directly even if they have permission to do that (and such permission should be sparse for obvious reasons).
Any feedback about this proposed feature, either here or in the tracker issue, would be greatly appreciated.
Hi everyone,
I've pushed to git at https://github.com/itamart/moodle-dataformview_pdf a beta version of the pdf view type for Dataform 2.6 onward.
For those who are not familiar with this view type, it allows exporting entries into a downloadable pdf file. It allows setting frame, watermark, permissions etc.
It should be fairly stable as this is a mere porting of the view type from pre-2.6 Dataform. Please test and report issues in the Set: Dataform tracker. When well tested we can add it to the standard release of the Dataform.
I've pushed to git at https://github.com/itamart/moodle-dataformview_pdf a beta version of the pdf view type for Dataform 2.6 onward.
For those who are not familiar with this view type, it allows exporting entries into a downloadable pdf file. It allows setting frame, watermark, permissions etc.
It should be fairly stable as this is a mere porting of the view type from pre-2.6 Dataform. Please test and report issues in the Set: Dataform tracker. When well tested we can add it to the standard release of the Dataform.