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Dashboard.md

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"Dashboard" Self-Assessment Summary Block

A "Dashboard" XBlock provides a concise way to summarize a student's answers to groups of multiple choice questions.

You configure it like this, by pasting in the url_names of some Problem Builder ("Mentoring") blocks: Screen shot of Dashboard XBlock configuration

And it will then look like this (after a student has submitted their answers): Screen shot of a Dashboard XBlock

Color Coding Rules:

Authors can add a list of rules (one per line) that apply colors to the various possible student answer values.

Rules are entered into the dashboard configuration "Color Coding Rules", one rule per line. The first rule to match a given value will be used to color that value.

The simplest rule looks like "3: red". With this line, if the student's answer is 3, it will be shown in red in the report. Colors can be specified using any valid CSS color value, e.g. "red", "#f00", "#ff0000", "rgb(255,0,0)", etc.

For more advanced rules, you can use an expression in terms of x such as "x > 3: blue" or "0 <= x < 5: green" (green if x is greater than or equal to zero but less than five).

You can also just specify a color on a line by itself, which will always match any value (usually this would be the last line, as a "default" color).

Visual Representation

The Dashboard also supports an optional visual representation. This is a powerful feature, but setting it up is a bit involved.

The end result is shown below. You can see a diagram, in which a colored arrow appears as the student works through the various "Steps". Each "Step" is one mentoring block, which contains several multiple choice questions. Based on the average value of the student's choices, the step is given a color.

In this example, steps that have not been attempted are grey-green, and steps that have been attempted are colored in according to the color coding rules.

Screen shot of visual representation

To achieve the result shown above requires a set of "stacked" image files (one for each step), as well as an overlay image (in this case, the overlay image contains all the text). For coloring to work, the images must be white where color is desired.

To build this example, the images used look like this:
Images Used

The block was configured to use these images as follows: Screen shot of visual representation rule configuration

The Visual Representation Settings used to define the visual representation must be in JSON format. The supported entries are:

  • "images": A list of image URLs, one per PB block, in the same order as the 'blocks' list (the list of url_names described above). If the images you wish to use are on your computer, first upload them to the course's "Files and Uploads" page. You can then find the URL for each image listed on that page (use the "Studio" URL, not the "Web" URL).
    • All images listed here will be layered on top of each other, and can be colorized, faded, etc. based on the average value of the student's choices for the corresponding group of MCQs.
  • "overlay": (Optional) The URL of an image to be drawn on top of the layered images, with no effects applied.
  • "background": (Optional) The URL of an image to be drawn behind the layered images, with no effects applied.
  • "width": (Important) The width of the images, in pixels (all images should be the same size).
  • "height": (Important) The height of the images, in pixels

Enabling in Studio

You can enable the Dashboard XBlock in Studio by modifying the advanced settings for your course:

  1. From the main page of a specific course, navigate to Settings -> Advanced Settings from the top menu.
  2. Find the Advanced Module List setting.
  3. Add "pb-dashboard" to the modules listed there.
  4. Click the Save changes button.