RecChat: Activity Pass Fail Logic - 09/29/2022
Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Bret Alarcon is joined by EDU Manager Zach Malloch and supporting members of the EDU team to discuss the Pass / Fail Logic available for the Activity Module. Zach demonstrates how to use the Activity Pass Fail Posting utility, creating rules using the Pass Fail criteria, and some example use cases for this feature.
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:07
hello and welcome to this edition of RecChat. I'm your host Alarcon. So today's Zach is going to be talking about the lesser known part of RecTrac, the activity Pass Fail logic. So maybe he has some activities that require you to pass them in order to sign up for the next level. Or you're just curious about how the Pass Fail logic works, and RecTrac Zach's going to show you how all that works. Also joining us are Seth Warren and Dan Rotondi. And they're going to be helping with some answers for your questions today. So how's everybody doing?
Zach Malloch 0:43
Doing pretty well, Brent, how are you
Bret Alarcon 0:45
doing? Doing? All right. All right, I have a little cold, powering through
Zach Malloch 0:49
it. That's happening. Well, we, I wanted to start this just by saying, I understand that we probably don't have any of our Florida customers on the call with us right now. But we're definitely thinking everybody and hoping that they're able to dig out, get back, dry out whatever needs to happen and that everybody is okay and safe. That being said, we do have an exciting topic to talk about Bret kind of alluded to it. And Bret, I see you're actually wearing our kind of unofficial logo. Oh,
Bret Alarcon 1:20
I completely forgot to change my shirt to a nice shirt. So
Zach Malloch 1:24
okay, sometime. Well, if you get us
Bret Alarcon 1:30
out of it today.
Zach Malloch 1:31
Well, let's see extra points to me if I can tie things back to Pokemon somehow today. All right. Well, yeah, let's go ahead and get started. I'll share my Screen. We are, of course recording this, if anybody has questions. We're joined by the inimitable Seth and Dan, who will help us identify those questions, maybe answer some. And actually, this was inspired by a case that Dan had last week Somebody had a question about, I guess they were on the web. And the customers were looking at the pass and fail status that they can potentially see over there. Right. And and they had some questions about that. And he thought this might be a good topic to talk about with more people. And I agreed. Thus, we're here. Let's go. Alright, so lots of different things to talk about today. Why use Pass Fail logic isn't enough, just ask people registered? Well, usually it is. But we have a lot of people who do like kind of certification classes, or you have multiple levels of swim lessons, and maybe you want to actually advance people beyond look like they have to actually demonstrate their competence, swimmer with the level one skills in order to get into level two. And if they don't do that, you leave them at the fail status. So they have to keep they have to do it again. So anytime you run into something like that, where usually it is tied to the prerequisite piece to take the next class, you have to have taken this or to sign up for this membership, you have to have taken this activity and passed it. Or maybe it's even like Rental equipment, you have to have certify you have to pass a whitewater safety class before you can rent out our whitewater kayaks, just kind of guessing with some of that stuff there. But the situations that I could see potentially happening. If anybody else has any other pertinent examples, I'd be curious about those, too. Feel free to drop those into the chat if you would like. And we can certainly address any or if you have any things where you're like, maybe this would work? Does it not? Sounds like a really good question to ask us. Let's look at how we're going to use this program.
Zach Malloch 3:31
So like most of the stuff in RecTrac, these days, I kind of completely gave it away right there. If anybody's looking at my Tabs, that's my fault for not turning those off. If we just Type in pass, well, we get a few other things because you know, we have a lot of paths, pieces, but activity paths failed. That happens to be at the very top there. So this is our program. Now, once you're in this program, all you have to do is pick the activity that you want to update the pass fail status for I'm just going to look for somebody that has some registrations. So this activity signature tests back from that thrilling RecTrac RecChat earlier this year, late last year. So actually almost a year ago, it looks like go ahead and select that. It shows me the roster. And it gives me the past fail status. Now I've already been in here for this one to to update that status, we can see that two or three people, let's just sorted by that. That's easier. Two people failed and three people passed. So really easy to find out right here. And if we have no we can come back in. I mean, this is kind of illustration. We can come back into this at any point so we can set the pass fail status, maybe somebody comes in does some extracurricular activities, tries to demonstrate their lessons after they did some private swim lessons. We just moved this to whatever status we want. We hit process selected. It's only going to change the one line that I had highlighted now we have four people that pass and only one person that failed here. So if I saw you unmute. Did you have something you wanted to add real quick?
Seth Warren 5:07
Oh, just Keith chatted in or put it into the question and answer Field saying that the chat is disabled? I don't know if we can.
Zach Malloch 5:16
Oh, let me see if I can do that real quick. Bret, can you see that somewhere? I feel like some of the controls that I normally have go away when I start presenting.
Bret Alarcon 5:31
Would it just be under chat? So I only see show chat previews. If that's the option, then you can?
Zach Malloch 5:38
Oh, actually, yeah, maybe is just right under chat. Attendees can chat with everyone. Does that help Keith?
Daniel Rotondi 5:52
Yeah, he did also have a question here too. Saying just the possible Pass Fail example here needs to have a valid senior center membership in order to sign up or pay for a senior center Field trip, would that be a valid test?
Zach Malloch 6:08
That is a perfect example of where you would use a pass prerequisite I think. So with and we're talking about Pass Fail prerequisites versus pass membership prerequisites. So here's your example, there is a pass membership prerequisite, you have to have an active membership to be able to take this activity, we're almost talking about the exact opposite of that, where you have to have taken this activity before you can do something else. And you know, we have a regular activity prerequisite criteria. But we can add another piece to that. Because if we just have that, by itself, it's has this person ever taken that class before. If it's anywhere in their transaction history, they'll pass that criteria on whatever rule you have. Or maybe it's a discount, if they did it last year, you get a lower rate to register this year, that criteria can move back and forth, we'll get into that criteria in just a moment. It's a very, very close, it's just kind of 180 degrees off. And we can also look at the pass criteria, if you want to look at how to do your exact example as well. And looks like chat is working. So nobody abused that power. But you can talk to everybody now. Okay, so this is this is the actual mechanics of it, you can see it's really, really simple. What if I want to do just those people and say that they failed? Well, I just highlight those a hit process selected. Now we've got three people that failed, and two people in the past, what if we just want to start over? Well, let's go to reset, let's hit process all and that removes the pass fail status entirely. And then I can go back and individually assign things or maybe everybody just did awesome. And they all get to pass. So very easy to move back and forth. It's not a fixed status, it's so much not a fixed status, that if you want to, you can move into your archive sections. And when I first came in here, and I was reviewing and refreshing myself for this presentation, like wow, why do we really need to do archived, it doesn't really make sense that you'd be going back into something so far go to then update the status. And the reason is, maybe you haven't been using this process, maybe you haven't been using that pass fail Toggle on the activity prerequisite and your rules, but you'd really like to. And normally, you'd have to, well, let's just do it this year, we'll keep track of everybody's pass and fail status, and then we'll start next year, well, you might not have to wait until next year, if you know, if there was any process at all that you have to re recording that sort of information, you can go back historically and update people. And then as long as the archive record has that updated pass or fail status, you will pull into that new rule. And actually, I'm talking about that rule and that criteria enough, let's just go into activity section management. Not necessarily that I want to create a rule, but just about not that I'm going to demonstrate using the rule necessarily, but I do want to show you what I'm talking about about that particular criteria. Let's just do a blank line.
Zach Malloch 9:01
Okay, so must have passed section. Or let's just say must have passed orientation. Alright, so you're allowed to do this, as long as you meet the criteria down here, we're going to choose an activity prerequisite. We add that criteria. Whatever activity I choose to define as the the orientation section, let's just pretend it is this multi enrollment class. So you have to have taken this class. It's optional, but you can also specify the season if it is something that changes. You can also say that it has to have been within a particular year has to have been within the current year or within the past year, or you can specify one and then here's this pass fail logic. Now this doesn't really say if you turn it on, is it only letting people who have passed or it was only letting people who have failed in just on the label? but you could probably guess that it's only going to let people that passed the previous section into this. I mean, maybe we can make a remedial prerequisite rule. So you can only get into this class, if you failed the previous one. If you want something like that, we can maybe write up an enhancement, I wouldn't hold my breath really tightly about how quickly we can get that new one in there. But this, that's all you have to do if you want to include the fact that somebody's past as well as just registered for the course to qualify for that particular rule to satisfy that criteria. Does that making sense? Everybody? I hope? So that's probably the main reason I'm sorry, go ahead.
Seth Warren 10:41
Oh, no, I was just gonna say so distress. It has to be an allow rule if you're going to use the Pass Fail logic, because if you like a disallowed rule, but then use the Pass Fail logic, would that disallow people that have passed the class?
Zach Malloch 10:53
Oh, that's a, that's a good point. And we also have not mode. And I was not even thinking about that. So there are a couple ways we could flip it around. So let's just double check, because it's probably the specifics of the way that the help is phrased here, determine whether you wish to use it using this pastor logic and really must have properly matched in roster history. And the history must have a status all passed to allow enrollment. Yeah, so if we just put on the not mode, then you must not have passed this activity. Although
Seth Warren 11:21
it's like a double negative, like, I disallow somebody if they did not pass the
Zach Malloch 11:28
right
Seth Warren 11:28
would be the same as allowing somebody if they asked,
Zach Malloch 11:31
yeah, but then we do run into, when you run into a complication, we'd have to do two criteria. So what I'm thinking is if we still want to say you have to have been in this activity, so you have to have registered for this activity. But you also have to have failed it. Like if I just did this as not mode, and I leave it left it as exactly as I set it up before here. Oops, that's I left it as Type, I think I was using like section five of my multi class enrollment test. We'll reset that. So right now, it's saying that I have to enrolled in or I cannot have enrolled in this, I have not cannot have a past status for this enrollment. But there's nothing if I just leave it at this. There's nothing that says that I have to have been enrolled in that class, like, as long as I have not had a past status for that class, I can enroll. So I think that I would have to do to activity prerequisites and basically have it kind of like this. So that I'm choosing the you have to meet both criteria. So this criteria is saying that you have to have been enrolled in this class, and you cannot have a past status for it. So everybody needs that. There's our there's our quick solution or easy one without doing an enhancement request. Good point, though. Very good point. So thank you for bringing that up. No problem. Okay. So we've talked a little bit about why we've talked a little bit about how, and now probably the next logical piece is to start talking about what you can do with it, how you can check to see what status is if somebody is really interested in like, Oh, I really want to get my kids into level three, did they pass level two? How does your front desk clerk find that out?
Zach Malloch 13:15
So there's a couple different ways to do it. And one of the first things that I'm going to mention is that when we're updating the status, this is technically an sadetail record. That's kind of technical. But when we're talking about reports, or we're talking about the way that the database is actually configured, it does become important maybe to understand that we are updating the sadetail status when we are updating the Pass Fail record status. So the main place that that becomes immediately apparent why that's useful is if I go to report output. And I'm misspelling a lot of easy things today, report output management. And so I created a new activity roster, I just had one that we had, and I cloned it, and I'm going to update that output. And here, so I've got a lot of different things, I'll just go ahead and get rid of some things that I don't need. So I'm not going to include my question and answer all here. Go back to my detail fields. So now I just need to find a place. Remove that's like, there we go. I need to find a place in here to put the right Field. And of course, I'm looking for pass fail status. So what happens if I look for pass? Well, if I there's pass fail, so all I have to do is drag that, throw it wherever I need to. And then that will now be a Field included on the report. So that's an easy way to get that status on the Roster Report. Now, probably most of the time you're running roster reports so that your instructor knows who should be there and you're not necessarily running them at the end of the class because your instructor already has multiple copies of that or what have you Okay. So we can also find this in a couple of different areas. Now, activity section inquiry is probably the most likely one that I would say I would guess most people will be going to. So this one has five people. And I think that's what I was testing before. So now if I Click on this roster, now that I'm in the inquiry, I'll get to see who's been enrolled in this class. As soon as it decides to load up, here we go. But if I scroll over, I don't see the pass fail status in here. I see enrollment status. But that's not exactly what I'm looking for. So if I go to Options, and I go to Show Settings, I'm going to configure this DataGrid to include that pass fail status. And Dan, can you remember how far down the list it might have been off the top of your head? Expose, like, could?
Seth Warren 15:57
Yeah, I think if you do a CTRL, F, you got it.
Zach Malloch 15:59
So that's, that's the nice thing about being a browser based program, I say this every time I do it, because it's so useful is if you hit Ctrl, F, and you Type in the word you're looking for, it will usually jump to that part of the list if you're looking for something really long. So that's, that's really nice. That it doesn't mean that this as long as if there's nothing below it, it will be the last Field on the DataGrid. Now, if I want to, I can, of course, drag this up. So maybe I just put it right next to the name information. So now I hit close. Now my DataGrid has been updated with that information, household ID, last name, first name, and then my pass fail status. And then of course, I can save this, if I go back into my settings. And let's say that I want to call this pass fail. And I create that as a new template. If I highlight that, and if I set it as my default, every time I go into activity section inquiry roster, it's going to have that Field already there for whoever set this default for themselves. Now, if I make this available for everyone, I think I can do that. And then just hit save. Yeah, so I guess I made a new copy of it. So I'll delete the old one. So now I have a version that's available for everyone. And what that means is that anybody that comes in here would be able to Click on the template drop down to pass fail, and then that Field will show up for them without having to go to Show Settings, find it, turn it on each time, or do that default, setting the piece that I just showed you.
Zach Malloch 17:28
So that's another way it's another easy place to find it. And then we kind of were brainstorming a little bit. And you know, the Passfield posting program is very specific to just show that information very directly, you pick a particular activity, and it shows you everything, but maybe you don't want your first your front desk clerks adjusting scores or adjusting this pass fail status when they're just trying to answer the question about a customer about whether or not they passed or failed. So this gets a little bit further. But we can certainly do a processing, Screen design. Through processing, Screen management, and the name of this is AR, so AR is activity, essay detail. That's the rec room, that's the actual table in the database that we're updating. And actually, I just want to point this out, too, I found that pass fail. And it's an essay detail Field, I meant to emphasize that when I was in the report output update, but a couple places just where it's useful to remember that. So the sadetail pass fail Screen. Now if I double Click on that, I get all of the fields I can use to select the items that I'm looking for, I get the results. So what's in the DataGrid, you know, whose information is there, how much information is there, I can get rid of things if I don't need that much. Or I can add if I want something else, although not a lot. And then at the very bottom, these are the buttons. So if you just disable or remove the two buttons that have the word process attached to them, then assign that Screen design to your front desk clerk user group, then they can get in there all day they can see anything they want to from any class, but they can't actually process any updates to it. So that gives you the benefit of kind of limiting their control once during that program, but giving them the option of some pretty deep abilities of finding it. Let's see the last thing I think I wanted to mention. Oh yes is that there is a self service option for this. Let me see if I have my WebTrac Open that looks like likely candidate. So I'll go ahead and sign in. So now under My Account, and I believe you said it was under
Daniel Rotondi 19:50
my history.
Zach Malloch 19:51
There you go. Okay, and then so we have this pass fail column and probably for 90% of you guys out there for 90% of your patrons, there's nothing in any of these. It's all just in a, which means you could potentially do Screen design, just remove that column if you never want to use it. But you're in the session curious about pass fail. So theoretically, you were more curious that that is what will actually put the status in there. So that kind of hits the main points I was hoping to go over. But I'd like to ask, Dan, if there's anything that he thinks I should maybe hit a little bit more, or like if your customer that had been on the phone with you that had that question, saw this presentation, do you think they'd still have questions?
Daniel Rotondi 20:41
No, Zack, I think you touched on everything there. They were just kind of curious about this last point. You know, they had gone through and done the Pass Fail posting, but they weren't kind of sure how to check the status after the fact, on RecTrac. And also on WebTrac. To they wanted to see if the patron can check their own status, which is available here on the account history page. I have a question for the audience. I'm wondering if anyone who's on the call is actually using this logic right now? And if so, if there's a scenario, which we haven't kind of touched on, I'd be curious to hear some of those use cases.
Zach Malloch 21:22
Yeah, that's a really good thing to ask for. And actually, while we're getting while people are responding to that, if you care to, I do want to Oh, man, I just had a really good idea right after that. And then it disappeared before I could finish saying it. That's frustrating. Pass Fail status.
Daniel Rotondi 21:42
to circle back to your Pokemon example, you have to pass all eight gyms before you can go on to the pokemon league.
Zach Malloch 21:50
I was gonna say like the RecTrac model modules, you really just need to collect them all.
Daniel Rotondi 21:54
There you go.
Bret Alarcon 21:57
Oh, my God,
Daniel Rotondi 21:57
I was I was trying to while you were going through the presentation to brainstorm some other use cases, maybe something instead of just an activity. For like a level two activity, maybe you have an inventory item where it's like a letterman jacket or something, and you have to have past the activity before you can purchase that inventory item.
Zach Malloch 22:22
Okay, so there's an interest. So Wendy just posted that they've been using pass fail, but not going any further with it? Because it didn't know how to set up the rules with the different pieces here. So I guess windy does this expand the ability that you will be using this is expand how you'll be using Pass Fail? Do you think you'll use that criteria? And that was the No, I said criteria. That was the other piece, I was going to come back to Heath's original question. And I was going to demonstrate the past prerequisite the past membership prerequisite to kind of cover that scenario also. So with if anybody wants to bring up more questions or put any other examples in here, I'd love to see them. But for Heath, your question, you would basically your your activity would probably be your Field trip. So you'd come into the Field trip activity, and you would add a rule. And assuming you don't have a default for this, we would just choose the past prerequisite criteria. And we would add that in here and basically say that you have to own a pass that is considered a senior senator pass. So I don't think maybe I have something. Yeah, there's my senior pass, but maybe senior learner also counts for this. So then if I link those three, as long as somebody has an active pass one of these three passes, then they would be able to register for this particular program. So if these are senior center passes, this is the senior center Field trip. Only people who own one of these three valid passes to be able to get in, nobody else will be able to. And you notice there's no Pass Fail logic like you don't have to. I've never heard of a scenario where you have to own a membership in a particular way to be considered successful at honoring that membership. There must be one but let's see. Casey just asked a question here. So your question state Cassie is so to confirm there is no way to see if a person passed or failed a particular activity within their household account. This information is only available in those reports. Well, now that you say that I'm I would not be surprised if we could go to household inquiry and get some information about the registration
Zach Malloch 24:51
I believe it's on the purchase history DataGrid
Zach Malloch 24:54
Well, I wasn't necessarily thinking that I was thinking potentially if we went to the If we hope Sorry, I got out of somehow I got back. Okay, let me just start that again, household inquiry this household joint activities. This can't be the only the activities that well, yeah, maybe this is all the activity oh yeah, this is all the activities that this household has ever registered for. That's the wrong date. So this is an sadetailed table. So let's just see if I go into options and show settings. If I can find
Zach Malloch 25:51
S S link password is. So we could bring that up here. Close. So right here in your ability to see all of the registrations that this household has ever had, or, you know, and then of course, once you're in the household, we can certainly filter it down to just one person. And then you can see their history and whether they have passed failed. So technically, we're kind of still getting to the sadetail, or sorry, the section inquiry, but we're doing it from the household inquiry program. I'm not sure if that is, I mean, I really can't think of a more direct way, I guess, to get to it.
Zach Malloch 26:42
But I feel like that's kind of a direct way to get to it. So wait for your feedback, if anybody has any complaints? That's terrible. Let me know.
Seth Warren 26:56
I don't think that's terrible. I mean, I think I think that is probably the most direct way to get it without looking at the report or, you know, the section inquiry.
Zach Malloch 27:06
All right. Well, we're almost at 230. And we have answered a few questions. And I've covered most of what I want. And Dan has told me that he's that I've covered most of what he wanted. So I think we're pretty close to the end of this, but Prepare for trouble. And to make it double, because there's another RecChat next week, when we have a fifth Thursday in the month, we just had another read chat, and then we get these two, back to back rec chats. So we'll have another session here for you next week. And we'll have a another interesting topic. Actually, if anybody has any suggestions for topics, I don't think we've picked one yet. So you can either throw something in chat or into the questions, or you can email us. And we'd be happy to give the activity Pass Fail treatments, whatever you bring to our attention. Any final closing, closing thoughts, Seth, Dan, or Bret?
Daniel Rotondi 28:02
Well, we didn't get any responses in the q&a on any current scenarios that we may not have covered. But I did just want to highlight the one that you kind of glossed over Zach, about the orientation. You know, I thought that that was a good example. Maybe you have a enroll by day activity for like an open gym, but you want to make sure that people have gone through orientation, and they know all the gym rules. So I thought that that was a great example, Zach.
Zach Malloch 28:27
Thank you, actually, now that you're saying it back to me, I am remembering a situation where you had to take a climbing wall safety orientation program, in order to get to purchase a climbing wall membership. I feel like maybe that was like an Oregon State University Type thing or something back, West Coast just has that association to my mind. But at the time, I think that they were just saying, Well, you just have to be in the class. And we'll just if somebody's a reckless safety hazard, we'll just know not to sell them a membership. But if somebody else is selling the memberships, or you want to be able to let the person buy the membership for themselves online, then having this extra piece of being able to tell the system that they passed, not just if they were enrolled in that course, is a good way to kind of control that sort of thing.
Seth Warren 29:19
Yeah, I'm sure I've seen customers too, that have had something similar where like, they'll set up an activity and you have to attend to that activity, just like the activity that's correct. Was that I guess, in order to sign up for something else, so I mean, there's no reason why you couldn't do it as like a pass fail just to signify like a, like a hunter safety course or, you know, something along those lines where, you know, you need to show or like any kind of martial art or something like that, or even to show proficiency or to move on to the next level.
Zach Malloch 29:48
Such a good word proficiency.
Seth Warren 29:50
It is a great word. I was gonna say to Meghan had a suggestion for next week, that it should be a free for all and an attempt to stump you and Bret Zach
Zach Malloch 30:03
Im hesitent to say that sounds like a good idea
Seth Warren 30:07
But I always think it's a great idea because you didn't include the Dan and I on it so stump Bret and Zach as much as you want Meghan.
Zach Malloch 30:15
Okay, but you understand Seth and Dan your phone a friend in this situation. All right. Well, yeah, thanks again. Oh, the one last thing that Seth's point brought up to me is we don't define pass or fail in any way that's for you to define. Maybe it's just that people showed up for 50% of the classes. They didn't have to demonstrate anything. Or maybe they did have to demonstrate something. But whatever your qualifications are for pass fail status, you can just use this as part of that process to man, I'm still just seeing Megan's comment there about the stump Bret and Zach. I'm not sure if I feel betrayed or not yet. All right, we will be sending out an invite early next week for whatever we decide to present on. And that'll be our last RecChat before the the in person symposium so we'll be will be already all just totally steeped in education topics. All right.
Seth Warren 31:12
Great. Can't wait to get people up here.
Zach Malloch 31:14
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's it for today. Thank you all so much for attending to the very end. Questionable how valuable last five SEC five minutes were but I had fun. Bret, I think we're ready for you to take us out whenever you're ready.
Bret Alarcon 31:29
All right. Sounds good take care everyone.
Seth Warren 31:31
Thanks, everyone.