Itamar Tzadok

You can use the Database activity (Database module). It can be a simple activity with one textarea (editor) field to enter the submission text. For printing you can add css for printer friendly view and a bit of javascript to to display a button which on click will open the window print dialogue box. There should be a more detailed explanation in the Database module forum and we can offer further help there.

See some relevant posts:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=262630#p1138013

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=262630#p1140141

hth

Turn debugging on at Site administration -> Development -> Debugging to see if there are any errors. If other Database activities on the site/course are working, and this one has no special settings, the data/content may be corrupted.

Can you post a screenshot of what the student sees in the activity?

It is not fishy, it is cached!

Try deleting or adding an entry and this should refresh the cache. The cache is refreshed in 60+ seconds intervals only if the feed content changes.

The Database comments is not a Database field so it cannot be csv exported. Comments are also not exported via the Database portfolio export. There is the Site administration -> Reports -> Comments which shows a list of comments, but it won't be of much help because it lists the comments from the whole site without context and it doesn't have an export function. So, there's probably no way to do this.

The Dataform exports comments to csv but the whole html. It may be enhanced to export the comments in plain text but we need to discuss how to do that so that it is usable. It should also be possible to export entries to html via the Dataform portfolios export but it is currently broken. If you are interested you can open a tracker issue in the Set: Dataform tracker (https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB/component/13430) and we can take it from there.