Assignment/Draft Features/Convert Submissions to Printable PDF
Convert Submissions to Printable PDF
This is a proposal for an additional feature to allow teachers to download all student submissions with each submission converted to a concatenated PDF (one per submission)
Goals and rationale
The main goals of this feature are to :
- Allow Teachers to send submissions to a printing service and receive each printed submissions stapled together.
Overview
Currently in the assignment module, when downloading submissions, a student submission may contain multiple files - printing services may not have the ability to group printed documents by filename patterns and may only support automatic stapling of the pages contained in a single printable document.
Status
The feature is currently only a proposal
Design
Changes to assignment settings
Add a batch grading operation in a feedback plugin to allow converting all the files for each submission to a concatenated PDF.
Concerns:
- Documents converted to PDF may not retain their original fonts/formatting
- Not all document types can be converted to PDF
- PDF conversion is a resource intensive task that must be done asynchronously
- Solution will rely on third party librarys for pdf conversion and may not be cross platform
The feedback plugin should use cron to convert all new/modified submissions to a concatinated PDF at a specified time each day. It should store the converted files in a separate file area in Moodle.
Changes to the grading table
An additional batch operation would be available to download concatinated PDFs for the selected submissions.
Capabilities
User Interface mockups
To be written
Database changes
To be written
Use cases
Teacher wants to send submissions to a printer and have them returned stapled by submission
- Teacher goes into the assignment the day after the due date (to allow conversion process to complete)
- Teacher selects all or some submissions and chooses "Download printable submissions".
- Teacher receives a zip file containing the PDFs and sends them to a printing service'
- Teacher receives a printed documents nicely stapled!
