Printing a lesson activity

Printing a lesson activity

by Nora Colazzo -
Number of replies: 8

It has been a while since we've spoken about printing a lesson activity but there is a growing need to make this happen.

We need to cater for students with disabilities and students without internet access or data. If a lesson can be printed, the option to print to PDF will support to view the content off-line. The option to print a hard copy of the lesson really helps users with disabilities that need a paper source. We need to think about inclusion when planning

Please vote for this so it can be reviewed by the developers https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-21547 


Cheers,

Nora

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In reply to Nora Colazzo

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Steve Bilton -

Hi Nora,

Take a look at this new plugin, which effectively prints Lessons as PDF's or EPubs - created for sheilds ltd, by Adam King.

The Export to PDF/EPub for lessons is something moodle users have wanted since I started using Moodle. As no developers seemed to take on this task, I set a member of the sheilds elearning team to solve this issue - The Local plugin was created and is currently compatible up to moodle v3.1.

We hope sharing this great plugin with the Moodle community will address the 'save / print' lesson issue for all.

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Steve Bilton

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Nora Colazzo -

That is awesome! Thank you so very much for the information. I have put in a request for our IT people to install this for testing immediately. I will certainly provide feedback in this community space. I am very excited about the possibilities of being able to save a Moodle lesson so I am looking forward to testing this plugin.

Much appreciated again. 

Cheers,

Nora

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In reply to Steve Bilton

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Nora Colazzo -

Hi Steve,

I wanted to give you some feedback on testing the plugin. Everything went through well with the installation but in the end, our Moodle Lesson activities weren't working at all. We only got a blank white screen. I believe that everything was configured correctly but perhaps the plugin isn't quite right for Moodle 3.1 as yet. This is the version we are running out here. I will try to send through some feedback to Adam King and I am more than happy to work with him on this as it is a great idea and very much a necessity for us. 

Cheers,

Nora

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In reply to Nora Colazzo

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Steve Bilton -

Hi Nora,

I have tested the plugin on Moodle 3.1.4 (today's release), installed the Lesson Export to PDF and had no issues what so ever.

Here's a screen shot attached showing it working in moodle 3.1.4


Do you have any useful debug messages, which would shed more light on why it's not working for you?

I'd try again using the latest version of the plugin and turn debug messaging on.

I've spoken with Adam and we can't see any issues for Moodle 3.1.

Thanks

Steve

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In reply to Steve Bilton

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Nora Colazzo -

Thanks Steve. I've just sent an email to our IT people asking them to investigate further to see why it wasn't working when installed. Surely we must have something wrong going on. So annoying!  Thanks very much for your support. You are a gem!

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In reply to Steve Bilton

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Nora Colazzo -

Hi Steve, we have reinstalled the Export to PDF plugin in our Moodle testing environment and all of our lessons are now coming up as a blank screen. Have you had this happen to you on installation and how did you resolve this? Do I need to add some code in the settings? I'm looking forward to having this plugin work for us here to help out our learners. I'm not getting what you show in your previous post. I get nothing really sad   

I'm very grateful for your support. Thank you kindly.


Cheers!

Nora

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In reply to Nora Colazzo

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Daniell Goodin -

Nova, 

Its been a few months and you may have sorted this out, but I came across this today as well.. Seems I have 2 out of 7 lessons that just don't want to export out the pdf. 

So I would say there is something within the coding of HTML within one of the lesson pages throwing an error.. 

As a quick fix if anyone comes across this thread again (google is your friend in times like this). The quick work around is to install the EPUB exporter for Lesson modules by Steve as well, then convert this to a PDF and import it in to the lesson manual. 

As a note if you don't have admin rights on your system, have a chat to your tech as they can adjust the the Moodle version to 3.1 if you are running a higher version ( so you can pull this plugin in, as its working on our 3.3 version).

https://moodle.org/plugins/local_lessonexportepub 

As a note from Steve's github (but an easy work around once you have pulled it in to a pdf creation program)

"Please be aware that security applied to the PDF documents will not be effective if you also use the EPUB exporter for Lesson modules as EPUB has no standard security measures available at the time of development."


Hope this helps save someone a mornings work as its little things like this that can get away from you. smile


Thanks to Steve for releasing this set of plugins.. should be a core component of Moodle as lessons take weeks if not months to create and a document as a backup is a critical component of this process. 

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In reply to Nora Colazzo

Re: Printing a lesson activity

by Adam King -

Hey Nora, 

Not sure if you're still having any issues with this, as it's been some time now, though I'm looking at giving the code a full refactor when I get around to updating it as the structure I ported the code from was very messy. If you have any useful information regarding your issues I'd be happy to work with you, or anyone else who discovers an issue, to issue a fix in the next version.

As Moodle rapidly moves forwards I may be tempted to deprecate older versions in favor of less bulky code with catch-all solutions and create a new branch for each version going forward with clean, object-orientated code in namespaces without the ugly franken-style function names. That should allow for better issue tracking and editing per-version with older branches eventually being left behind, anyway.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)