Moodle Journal plugin fucntionality

[JohnGerrard79]

Hi, I work at an adult education organisation offering online courses and we use your journal plugin for students to record thoughts and comments, as well as audio and video commentary.

Would it be possible to develop the ability to download this journal when students finish their course? At the moment I have to recommend them cutting and pasting any text out, and to use a browser screen recorder to replicate any audio/video in a format they can save.

Another idea is if you were able to extract all journal entries by date of entry into separate cells/columns in a CVS/Excel file (excluding any multimedia files) so that the student at least has a chronological record of their notes.

The journal plugin is like by our students but there is growing frustration that they can't easily save what they've created. Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks,
John

[chris-pratt-olms]

We would see real value in some way for students to export their Journals to help form some kind of ePortfolio when they have finished a course - in a variety of formats to suit the content they have used within their journals.

[taymossimc]

I, too, would like to see an "export" function.
I imagine it as a button that when the user clicks it takes them to another screen that asks them where it should go. One option would be to download, another would be to email to self, teachers of the course, or perhaps to user-supplied email address? In any of those cases, a script would then compile the journal entry as an HTML (although what to do about media files like images? Perhaps those that are linked externally stay external and those that were uploaded are "packaged" with the HTML of the journal file with the links changed) and send it off. If export-as-html is too difficult right now, even just a function that strips the images and formatting would still be quite useful.

[adrian-sarmas]

@JohnGerrard79 , @taymossimc , @chris-pratt-olms I am looking into implementing an export feature, but I need to clarify your workflow to ensure I build the right thing.
The Journal activity is designed as a single-entry system. When a student updates their journal, they are technically editing/overwriting a single record in the database, rather than creating a new distinct "post" (like a Forum or Blog).
When you mention a "chronological record," do you mean:
One Journal Activity: Students manually type a date (e.g., "Oct 12th") inside the text editor, write their notes, and later append new notes with a new date below the previous text?
Multiple Journal Activities: You have created separate Journal activities in the course (e.g., "Journal Week 1", "Journal Week 2") and you want a bulk export of all of them at once?
If it is case #1: We cannot separate the notes into Excel columns because the system sees it as one block of text. However, we can provide an "Export to HTML" button. This would download a single file looking exactly like their journal entry (preserving images, formatting, and their manual chronological ordering).
If it is case #2: We would need a course-level export tool, which is significantly more complex.
Could you confirm if "Export to HTML" (downloading the entry exactly as it looks on screen to a file) would satisfy your students' need to save their work?