 Thank you very much and welcome to this session. I'm Sarah and I'm with the Moodle US team. I work as a solution architect there and help clients to set up their Moodle and train them on how to use Moodle. So I'm going to share with you five different ways that you can use the database activity. So the database activity in Moodle is one of it can be very simple and it can be very complex at the same time. But you can start very simple like making things just mold it into what you want it to be. I take it like Play-Doh or clay or just Lego bricks that you put together to make numbers and letters to start off with like I taught my son and then all of a sudden he was making Mario and Mario in both Lego and in clay. But you can take your database activity to that complexity if you want to. So I'm going to show you some simple setups and I'm going to show you a few of the complex ones as well. So three key characteristics that you want to keep in mind about the database about the database activity. I can't hear myself though. Can you hear me still? No. Yeah. It's going to go higher. Thank you. OK. So three key characteristics about the database activity are that it's multi-purpose and portable and adaptable. What do I mean by multi-purpose? You can have academic activities that are for learning within courses. You can have it that is non-academic being used by staff for clerical reporting and tracking of things in the back office. You can use it in a group setting for team-based activities and you can use it as an individual one-on-one student, single person using the tool, private. It's portable because you can package it up and give it to someone to use on their own Moodle site or you can set it up in such a way that people on the same Moodle site in a different course, a different instructor can use the templates that you've provided. You can also adapt it so when you get to reuse it, you can take it as it is and use the same setup or you can change a few things, change some colors, change the names of the fields that are in the database and adapt it to make it what you want it to be. So those are three key characteristics about database. So first example, there was a biology teacher who had a project for the class that they had to set up, they had to research an organism and write up the details in a web page. Back in the day, they used Microsoft's front page, anybody remember those days? And then they started trying Dreamweaver, but it ended up becoming a problem that the students are trying to learn HTML in order to just get their information up on the site rather than focusing on the learning that they had to do. And so we decided let's use the database activity to solve that problem. So in this, they did their research on their assigned organism and then they put the information into the database activity as a template and then they used a questionnaire tool to use for peer review. Everybody reviews their friend's posts and then based on the information and feedback, then they post, make a revision and then in a final second database where all the different groups of organisms that belong together, like different species that belong together, were grouped in a final database. And they just had a standard form that they filled in with very familiar tools. It ended up giving them a standard page that looks like a web page, but they didn't have to figure out HTML, they didn't have to figure out CSS or anything. Even images that they put in, whether whatever size they put in, because the database, you can specify the width and height of what the images should look like, everybody's image was the same. And so that standardization really helped them. And they added a print button so that they could print their page to a PDF and take it with them to add to their portfolio later on. So that was really nice. When they are editing or adding entry, they see very familiar tools, text boxes, radio buttons, drop down menus, very, very familiar. Nothing confusing, no HTML code in sight. So in the second example that I'm going to share, the problem was that a online education team needed to track where professors were in their course building journey. And the marketing team needed to know which courses are ready so that we can begin to market them for the upcoming semester. And they didn't know that. So what we did here is a non-academic use case, clerical, for the backend office to track where course development was. In the description area of the database, we have a generic filter giving us tabs with instructions of how to use the database. And the second tab was a list of YouTube links for videos and training on how to do things. So here you're looking at the list view, which gives you the list of entries and each entry is a course that somebody is building. And you can see who is building it, what department, what school, what faculty, what certificate program it belongs to. And then there's a little tag on the end there about how much percent in terms of the progress. And so the marketing guys can come on in and say, oh, this one's a hundred percent. Ooh, that's the last one in the space program certificate. So we're ready to market that one. So very easy for them to big picture, see what was ready. And the online education team could also track and see, okay, the last time this was modified was like a month ago. Where is this professor at? You know, what's going on? You can follow up and see what's going on with this person and why they haven't updated their course development. So again, when you're looking at a single course, a single entry, you have control over what it should look like. Up in that orange little cell there, we actually have a little JavaScript that is computing the percentage. So as they fill in different parts of their completion, the percentage goes up until they've completed everything and it's a hundred percent. This is what it looks like when you're adding an entry. You have control over what it should look like. OK, so big form, labels on the left, information to fill in on the right. You have checkboxes, you have multi-select tools. We even have links to the YouTube video. So every role is a step in the course development process. And so if you are at course data completion, what do I need to do there? You click show me. It takes you to the YouTube playlist. You learn what to do. You do it and then you check off the box and say, yeah, I've done this, I've done that, I've done that. OK, so easy to track. All right, third use case, academic. I'm taking it back and forth. So an academic use case here was a post first discussion board. What in the world is a post first discussion board? You might be wondering, well, sometimes you have a topic that might generate common answers or similar answers across the board from different students. And you want them to post their original thought. First, before they see what the rest of the class has posted and then you're like, oh, yeah, I agree with so and so. Let them focus on their initial thought, post it, share it, and then they can see what the rest of the class has done. So it's kind of called, in a funny way, academic, pin the tail on the donkey. And the way that this works in the database activity is the settings where you have the entries. You can say you want them to complete x number of entries before they can view any entries. And so that is what's happening over there, the settings. You might wonder why not use a Q&A forum? The Q&A forum is a thread by thread, but not the entire forum. You want them to be able to post before they see the rest of the forum, but it's not possible to arrange that in a Q&A forum. So the database is a solution alternative to that. Fourth use case, another academic use case. A clinical, well, medical school had students doing their clinical rotations and every time they have to submit certain documents after a rotation, it wasn't very easy to figure out have they submitted all the required documents for a particular rotation? And this was because they had 10 assignment links, 10 individual assignment links and it was confusion. But by creating one database, it was easy to see for one student all the different rotation documents. You set it up so that each student is in a group by themselves with the advisor. So it's private because it's a medical school, there might be HIPAA situations where there's patient data and things like that. So keeping it private would solve that problem there. And then the student uploads their information into the database, the advisor is able to see it and give feedback. So 10 links to one, very beautiful. So you're looking at entries by one student, you can easily see by sorting by rotation. There are three documents from the literature, there's one for medicine, pediatric, oh, he's missing one more thing for medicine. So you can easily see and track and chase after the students for what they need to do. And the student can also see for themselves, oh, I'm missing something. So this is the list view. And when you look at a single entry, you can see a little more detail. And the advisor can provide a feedback document and also there's a comments feature so that the advisor can actually have a discussion with the student about that particular entry. So you can introduce some interactivity through the comment field. Again, adding an entry, the form that they use to add the entry, you have so much control, you can even put the instructions in on what they need to do when they're filling the entry, right? It's your form, whatever you wanna put on it is up to you. So students know very, very specifically how they should name the file, what information they should put, et cetera. Okay, last use case, community service log. So kind of academic but not quite really community service. Everybody has to help out in the community and they get certain credits for getting X number of hours and the students couldn't really tell how they met the requirement for graduation. They get to the time where they want to matriculate and then they say, oh, you haven't finished your community service, oh, but I did blah, blah, blah. Okay, so solution database and let's track your community service. So here, a student can enter their different activities that they've done and how many hours they served for that activity and there's JavaScript that is computing the number of hours and totaling it up for them so they can see. I needed to have 10 hours of project A and five hours of B and one hour of C and they can see where they are in all of that. Okay. So you might be like, whoa, this is all interesting. How do I create this now? So how to create a database activity really quickly? You add an activity or resource and the database is not a plugin. It is out of the box in your Moodle site. You can find it there right now. So add an activity and select database, put in the name, put in the instructions and the main thing is in the setup of entries and all these other configurations. That's where your decisions make a difference on how the students interact with or your end users interact with the tool. After you've hit save, you're not done, you then have to decide what fields you want to use. What information do you wanna collect? So you have to set up your fields. Then you have to set up the templates for how things should look when they're looking at a list. How should it look when you're looking at a single entry? How should it look when they're adding an entry? All these are decisions that are in your hands and you can do whatever you please with it. So let's take a look at the secrets. So in adding entries, you have decisions on when and when you want to open the database for entries to be added. You can set up a date when entries should be closed. You can set up whether you want them to enter X number of entries before they can view. You know what are your requirements for that? You can set if you want to allow comments as a text box, you can say yes, let's do comments. And there's an approval system actually too. So if you enable the approval system, you get a little thumbs up icon that allows you to say this can become public to the students. Otherwise, it's only the author, the person who uploaded the entry who can see it and the teacher. Okay, so if you introduce the approval system, you create a private, you add a privacy element to the activity. You can also introduce ratings so that students can rate each other's posts with numbers or thumbs up or stars. You can add a rating system. I talked about adding fields. This is the screen for adding fields. You have all these different types of fields. You can collect checkboxes, dates, a file where they browse and pick a file. So all these options are there. You can make something required or not required. So go ahead and set up your entries and then the templates. So as I said, you have a template for when you're adding an entry, when you're viewing a single entry, when you're viewing a list of entries and when you're even searching. That's a search feature. So if people are searching, you probably don't want all the fields there. It doesn't make sense to have all of them. You might want the name of the activity and maybe a date and things like that. So pick and choose what you want them to see when they're searching. So you get a wizardware editor, HTML. What you see is what you get. You can color things. You can add images. You can add links as you saw. I put in YouTube links and things like that. And you can turn off the editor so that you just work with HTML. And usually when you're doing the list view, it is recommended that you turn off the editor. I show you there's a little checkbox. In modal 4.0, there's a little checkbox in the lower right corner that you uncheck so that you can just look at it in HTML and have more control. So the term is done and you want to save everything you've done. What do you do? You can archive the entries that students have posted and you can do that with a button there for exporting your entries. If they uploaded files and images, those do not get exported. So in order to be able to save that, you need to back up the activity. So you know you can do a backup of a course, but you can also back up an activity. So while you're on that database page, you go to the dropdown and then you do backup and it backs up only that database activity with everything that's in it, okay? And how do you then share it with somebody else? So you can package it up as a preset. A preset stays on the same site and becomes a radio button that they pick from. You see in the bottom right, you see a whole list of radio buttons. So you can pick and say, I want to use this template and it gives you the same setup, exact same setup and then you can customize. Or you can export a preset and it gives you a zip file and you can share the zip file with somebody. They'll use it on their Moodle site and it works exactly the same. Very, very handy. Okay, so this is the portability part. There are goodies for you to download and you can go to the site that I've set up and download the presets that I've made available. There's a preset for 3.11 and there's a preset for 4.0 and above. So you can download all of that. And I've also set up database activities that you can actually play in but you need to create an account and then play around. Add an entry, see how it works and ask questions. So thank you very much. Are there any questions for Sarah? So I was really excited to hear you say you can use it for administrative tasks because I just got asked to build this. They want to use it for special topics course proposals and what I was wondering is if there's a way to have multiple teachers comment on it because it needs to go through like a three-step approval, how would I register that three different offices have seen it after one person has submitted it? I'm sorry, give me the last part. Three different people have to... So, that's loud. So a professor submits their special topics course idea. Their department chair needs to sign off on it and academic dean needs to sign off on it then the registrar needs to sign off. Is there a way to have like three different sets of comments where I'm tracking where it is gone in the process? Oh yeah, because it's user specific, right? When you post a comment, you know who posted the comment and when, so they could do that. If you maybe put them in private groups, each student is in a group by themselves and you put in the other approvers into that same group then they see that student's work and they can comment on that together. But it will show up in the same comment field. Like there isn't a way to add like a post submission box where it's coming in later. Is there? Oh, the permission thing? The approval? Yeah, it's only one person who can approve that. Okay, okay, thanks. Top honcho. Any more questions? Mary? Actually, it's not a question, it's just an observation on MoodleNet, the new MoodleNet. There's a collection of lots of database presets, I think including yours because yours are great. So go to MoodleNet and if you search for database presets, you get lots of ideas there. Think there's one over there. Hi, I was just wondering if the database uses tables for the ListView and the SingleViews, how we will be making those accessible in the future because there are strong recommendations for not using tables for presenting non-table data. So are there other ways of making the database activity accessible to users who use screen readers or other aids to access their Moodle courses? That's a good question. So you don't have to use the tables in the templates. You can make it table less if you want. I mean, people use CSS and just code the information, make it look in a particular way. So you're not actually using table cells but it looks as though it's a table but just because the CSS is controlling it and therefore then you can also put in accessibility, like tab structure and all that kind of thing if you want to. But I think that probably in the upcoming 4.1 database improvements, they are working on improving that for the future. Any other questions? Thank you. Oh, there's one more there. So it's not really a question. It's another example of a non-academic use of a database. I'm a lecturer but I'm also in charge of the schedule generation for my department. And when I start this job, we ask the lecturers a lot of data about the requirements of the lecturers on exams. And each year we have to re-ask the same question and receive the same information. So after that we, in order to avoid that, we start to use a Moodle database and now the lecturers will introduce the data one time at the beginning. And after that each year she just has to check if everything is okay or not and to change what should be changed. And one, another advantage of this method is that the database is always available. So if a lecturer changes something in his lectures and it will influence the way we will have the exam, maybe a written exam will change into a neural exam and he could change it in the database when he performs the change and not have to wait for the time we ask for the requirements. Because sometimes they forget that there is a change. Thank you.