13 February 2014, 16:30

We have recently created a Mahoodle and are starting to work out the best ways of using it for both teachers and students.  At the moment, when a forum post is exported it can be exported as a html file which lands the "incoming" folder in the files area or as in Leap2A format which creates a new journal (not an entry in a journal) each time a post is exported.  I would like to be able to create a template (page)  with a journal block in it and then have all the journal posts appear in that block.  (The page would also contain other blocks and would be designed to be used to provide evidence of competency.)    In order for that to work it would be necessary to have all of the exports in one journal or be able to move posts from one journal to another journal.  i understand that there are currently no options which allow either of those actions.  Is this something which may be considered in the future?

13 February 2014, 21:53

Jennifer,

Can you confirm if you are talking about forum posts or journals, because you seem to switch between the 2.

Also, I'd probably seuggest asking this question in the Developers forum, as it seems more relevant to there.

Thanks

19 February 2014, 8:05

Hello Jennifer,

This issue has been bugging me as well, but I'm not aware of any concrete plans at the moment to address this in the near future. It's not a trivial thing to change because the export does not know at the moment which journals exist. If you imported everything into one journal and that got deleted at some point, where would things go? So I assume that it might be necessary to be able to specify the journal into which content is imported during the export process.

Cheers

Kristina

 

25 February 2014, 15:30

Thanks Wullie and Kristina

What I am thinking is an option which would allow the user in Moodle to choose a journal, and if no choice is made then .....

A little bit like when a user in Moodle submits an assignment they can choose which Mahara page to submit.

Looks like that is not available now but perhaps it could be considered for development in the future.

Thanks again

Jen

02 March 2014, 22:50

Hello Jennifer,

Yes, that would be great to choose the designation journal. Mahara information is not yet pushed to Moodle to make it display during an export to Mahara though. Some work would be necessary...

Cheers

Kristina

 

03 March 2014, 11:32

Yes, I actually looked into this a few months back, what it would take to make the Moodle Mahara Portfolio plugin more interactive in regards to where the content winds up being exported to. The short answer is that it would take some not insignificant technical effort to change it.

The reason it work the way it currently does, in fact, is because on the back end Moodle is sending a Leap2a file to Mahara, with the forum post as miscellaneous content in the file. When Mahara imports a Leap2a file and it contains text content that isn't strongly mapped to a specific artefact type, its fallback is to create a new journal, and put the content into an entry in that journal. And that's what happens with these Moodle exports.

Now that I think about it, the reason we import into a journal entry is probably because this was implemented before we had the standalone Note artefact. Miscellaneous text content from leap2a would probably make more sense as a Note artefact... maybe we should change it to use that instead?

Cheers,

Aaron

03 March 2014, 12:58

Thank Kristina and Aaron for your replies and helping me to understand the reasons etc for how it works.

Aaron, I tend to agree.  Exporting to Notes might make more sense then creating new journals each time.

Regards

Jen

 

04 March 2014, 8:16

Hello Aaron and Jennifer,

Yes, I agree, too. A standalone note would make more sense. And yes, the portfolio export had been implemented before we had those. We would need to find a way though for forums as well. You can now not only export one forum post but the entire forum.

Cheers

Kristina

 

04 March 2014, 10:51

What happens when you migrate an entire forum post? Does it turn into a journal with multiple entries?

That would not really work for notes... there's no way to relate them to one another. :(

Maybe what we need is the ability to convert a journal entry into a note, or vice versa. That's actually not that crazy of an idea, especially now that notes can have file attachments.

Cheers,

Aaron

09 March 2014, 12:13

Hi Aaron,

When you export an entire forum and not just one post, the entire journal will be the discussion forum.

Chers

Kristina