Insight Journal

Security

Group-based visibility settings (e.g. "only my own group visible") are now correctly enforced after a course restore (backup/restore). Previously, a restored group could in rare cases be incorrectly treated as fully visible.

Added

• A color picker next to the hex field for the activity's background colour.


• A live word count next to the character counter while writing a response.

Improved

• Course and activity reports now load significantly less data in the background on courses with many groups/participants — noticeably faster load times.


• The "minimum characters" help text now makes clear it only blocks the completion mark, never saving itself.

Fixed

• A course reset now also resets completion status correctly, instead of leaving an activity marked "complete" after its entry was deleted.


• A response consisting only of whitespace or invisible characters now correctly counts as empty.

Full changelog: https://github.com/71Professor/moodle-mod_insightjournal/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#090-beta---2026-08-06

What's new in 0.8.0-beta

New

• Activity views and entry saves now fire Moodle's standard events (course_module_viewed, entry_created, entry_updated), so InsightJournal activity now appears in Reports → Logs and is available to log-consuming plugins (analytics, notifications, etc.).

Fixed

• Group-restricted reports (Separate Groups mode) are now scoped correctly per activity and per grouping. Previously a teacher without "view all groups" could see participants outside their actual group/grouping, or in some cases too few. This mainly affects sites using Separate Groups with multiple activities/groupings in one course.


• The course-wide report's CSV export now streams in bounded chunks instead of loading the whole course into memory, fixing long load times on large courses.


• A save conflict on the no-JavaScript fallback path no longer silently discards the learner's unsaved text — the draft is now preserved with a clear conflict notice.


• A genuine database error during save is no longer mislabeled as an ordinary "someone else saved a newer version" conflict.


• The server's character-count check (min/max characters) now matches what the live counter shows the learner while typing, so multi-paragraph or list-formatted entries are no longer wrongly rejected as too long.

Changed

• Participant email addresses in reports are now only shown to viewers with the appropriate Moodle capability and site configuration, matching Moodle's own identity-field permissions.


• The course-wide report's CSV export now uses Moodle's standard CSV writer (adds UTF-8 BOM, stronger formula-injection protection), matching the activity report's export.


• The course-wide report's per-learner progress count now includes private entries as completed, matching the activity's own completion tracking.

Hardening

• Release workflow security fix; expanded automated test coverage. No user-facing change.

What's new in 0.7.1-beta compared to 0.6.0-beta

Separate Groups support

• Trainers without the "access all groups" capability now see only their own group's participants when Separate Groups mode is active — in the activity report, the course-wide report, and the personal summary page. Previously every report showed all participants regardless of group mode.


• The activity now supports the standard Moodle "Group mode" setting on its edit form.

Faster, paginated reports

• The activity report and course-wide report now load entries page by page (20 per page by default, adjustable via a URL parameter) instead of loading every matching row at once — noticeably faster on large courses.


• The activity report's CSV export now runs through Moodle's own export writer (column format unchanged, now includes a UTF-8 BOM for better Excel compatibility).

More reliable saving

• Fixed a rare race condition where two genuinely concurrent saves (e.g. two open tabs) could result in a newer version being overwritten. A detected conflict is now reliably flagged, and the user's own still-editable draft is preserved.


• The response field is now rendered via a standard Moodle form, so it also works with JavaScript disabled entirely. With JavaScript enabled, autosave, the character counter, and the conflict notice all continue to work as before.

Privacy

• The revision field (used for save-conflict detection) is now correctly documented in the Privacy API and included in the user's data export.

0.2.0-beta — first public beta

Insight Journal is a focused reflection-prompt activity. Each activity instance
holds one prompt; learners write, save, and can return later to edit their
personal response.

Features

• One insight prompt per activity instance, with optional autosave while typing.


• Optional minimum-character completion rule, so the activity completes only
  once a response is long enough.


• Trainer activity report with participant search and CSV export (values are
  sanitised against CSV/formula injection).


• Course-wide progress report across all Insight Journal activities in a course.


• Printable personal summary of a learner's own entries.


• Full Privacy API support (export/delete) and backup/restore, including
  learner responses.


• English and German language packs, with contextual help for all activity
  settings.


• Accessible autosave status (ARIA live region) and screen-reader-friendly
  form labelling.

Fixed

• The minimum-character completion rule is now correctly registered and
  evaluated: activities respect the required response length on save, and
  revert to incomplete if a response is shortened below it.

Verified with an automated PHPUnit and Behat test suite, plus PHPStan static
analysis.

This is a beta release aimed at educators and Moodle developers for feedback
ahead of a stable 1.0. Please report issues on GitHub:
https://github.com/71Professor/moodle-mod_insightjournal/issues