Understanding the bksb Databridge

bksbLIVE allows 2 way data communication between bksbLIVE and your servers. This is achieved by installing a small web application (the bksb Databridge) on a server within your organisation which then permits bksbLIVE to store and retrieve information from the Databridge. The application is a web service so generally sits on port 80, but you can change this in IIS. On your firewall you’ll need to allow the IP range: 54.77.122.39 access to your server on whichever port you choose (443 if you setup SSL on your IIS).

Users

In the database (of the Databridge installed on your server), you can create views to pull in data from your MIS database, such as username, first name and last name, as well as groups and group membership information. This means that when a learner attempts to login to bksbLIVE, it will first search the bksbLIVE database on our (bksb) servers and if the user is found it will log them in. If the user is not found, it will connect to your server and see if the learner exists in your MIS database. If they do exist, then it will pull the learner over from your server to the bksbLIVE servers and log them in with a default password of ‘password’ (all lower case). Once logged in, the learner will need to confirm their details and change their password.

Results

When a learner completes an assessment, the result is immediately sent over to your server and stored in the Databridge. This means that you can then develop internal systems to look at the data sent from bksbLIVE and show live results.

Group Synchronisation

When groups have been added to bksb, there is a (group) option to synchronise the group information and members. This means that when you click synchronise, new learners will be imported to the group and remove the association with any learners which are no longer in that group (no learner data is lost in this process, just simply no longer linked to the group).

Retrieving Results

bksb_InitialAssessmentResults – select by username to get all IA results for a learner, then filter by Subject to get ICT, PLTS, LS, ENG and MATHS results. Use Result_DisplayShort to display the IA output and order by result_rank desc and select top 1 to retrieve their best result for a subject e.g.

SELECT
    TOP 1 result_displayShort 
FROM bksb_InitialAssessmentResults 
WHERE subject = 'ENG' 
ORDER BY Result_Rank DESC

bksb_moduleAssessmentResults – This table will contain all the Skill Checks a learner has completed. You can select by username to return all results that have been completed, along with a percentage (75% and above is a pass).

bksb_ModuleProgressRecords This is the diagnostic result output. You will need to perform a left join similar to the one below to select the diagnostic results for a learner.

Left Join bksb_CurricCodes on Module ID = Curric_ref

The ICT results can be ignored as ICT is an initial assessment that is used as a diagnostic course. This allows it to produce links to resources like the other courses. To extract ICT results please use the Initial Assessment result table.

The example below shows how a query would be executed to extract the diagnostic results of a learner at
level 1.

SELECT
    [userName],
    bksb_curriccodes.[subject],
    bksb_curriccodes.[Level],
    [DisplayShort],
    [DisplayLong],
    [BestScore],
    [TutorMarkComplete],
    [ModuleAssessmentsRqd],
    [ModuleAssessmentsPassed],
    [ModuleDiagnosticComment],
    [ModuleCurrentTrackingComment]
FROM bksb_ModuleProgressRecords
LEFT JOIN bksb_curriccodes
ON bksb_ModuleProgressRecords.ModuleID = bksb_curriccodes.curric_ref
WHERE userName = 'test'
AND [Subject] = 'Num'
AND [Level] = 'E2'
ORDER BY ModuleDiagnosticComment DESC