Snapshot - flat HTML export of complete course

Motivation

If you want to retain a completed Moodle course for future reference the only way, currently, to keep it visible is to leave it in place on a Moodle site. If the institution has a policy of having course material available to students for a number of years (as is often the case) this can effectively multiply the number of Moodle courses by a factor of as much as five or six. As Moodle has no concept of versions of a course this, at best, adds to the clutter and confusion for students. At worst it may impose a serious performance and resources problem for the site.

There is really no requirement for these courses to remain active in the sense that interactive portions of the course still operate. In fact it is actually a benefit that the interactive activities in archived courses are *not* operational (ie, are read only).

This proposal, therefore, is to explore a system for generating "flat" HTML files of a course at a particular point in time. This could typically be at the end of a course when the active Moodle course is removed but the snapshot will remain available in an archive area. There are other benefits; the code to generate HTML representations of each activity is likely to have other applications, e.g., material for ePortfolio inclusion. Indeed, it would be relatively straightforward to include on the bottom of each activity page a "Portfolio this" button (although I'm sure there's a better name out there)

Technical Overview

The basic idea is that the user will click the Snapshot button (probably) in the Course Administration menu and this will generate a zip file containing a set of HTML pages and files. The representation of the course page will be the index.html file. Each resource or activity will have its own HTML page (or pages where required). The course files will be copied into the zip file as required.