Hello Ron, Lynette and Linda,
I think the right solution to this problem would be a button to download students' responses to lesson essay questions with a select menu to choose the file format for the download.
Something like this:
But please note this is just an image I have made to show how it could look, I have not yet written the needed code to add this feature.
And even if this feature is integrated into Moodle in the future it will go in a future version, it will not be backported to older versions.
Unfortunately, for now I have other more urgent things to fix in the lesson module for instance MDL-43386 and MDL-45679 are IMHO really needed. It would also be good to have a way to give time/date extensions to individual students (this is MDL-7315 and MDL-27042 and is in fact the most voted tracker issue for the lesson component but it needs quite a lot of work)
I am a teacher so I work on the lesson module in my free time and my goal is to solve one or more lesson bug per week but so far I am quite satisfied of the results even if I have not started to work on the most complex issues .
Unfortunately the number of open issues for the lesson module is quite big!