Learning Journal In Rise

Hi Drew, we decided to remove this feature as we had people losing their entries and we were not able to conclude why. We replaced it with a downloadable word document with the journal questions, so that people could capture their answers and reflections along the way safely.

Hi Mike

Love your solution here, it's excellent and absolutely the sort of thing Rise should be including by default by now...

Quick question - I found it very easy to set up the journal and customise it as needed, I just want to know - is it expected behaviour for the script to remove ALL notes statements whether they contain the specific text labels identified or not?

In other words, if I use the journal, I can't use notes statements elsewhere in the course?  

Thanks

Nic

Nic I have been able to use note statements as well as the journal entries in the modules I am building no issues....

Hi Mike

We have a lot of reflection checklists in the Rise 360 course... There's no right or wrong answer to them as everyone completing will have a different opinion (hence why they're reflection checklists). I would love to be able to collate the responses from within the module (similar to your journal entries) and then have a print button at the end. Given your experience, do you think that this would be possible with the right know how?

Hi Michelle

Thanks for the info. I just set this up today and I had a number of the note statements in my module summary section and none of them were visible with the journal script applied. 

I hadn't made any changes to the code beyond changing fonts and colours, and re-labelling the buttons in the javascript file.

The ones I had in were just text-based and definitely didn't have any of the relevant text labels in them. 

Weird!

Nic

Sooooo.... I have just relooked at mine - and you're absolutely right :O

Nicola and Michelle,

Thanks for finding this bug regarding all notes being removed! I can't truly test it currently because I no longer live in the learning development world and have no access to Rise. Can you use this test file to test whether non-Learning Journal notes appear as expected?

(link removed)

Mike

Michelle,

That is very achievable. In fact, a couple years ago, I extended the functionality of the Learning Journal to include both checkboxes and Madlibs. Here is the version that includes both those features. Simply search for the word "checkbox" to see all the code in the file related to the checkboxes. If the "Part" field is set to 1, the checkbox is clickable. But later in the course if the same ID is used but the "Part" field is set to 2, the checkbox is read-only, allowing you to display all the checkbox results at the end. Warning: this is from a stale, 2-year-old branch of the Learning Journal and therefore simply replacing your LearningJournal.js file with this file will fail. But it's a good start.

Mike

Tess,

To change the text in the buttons, see the section around line 72 and replace with your desired text:

// These are the text for the Print buttons
var PrintAllButton_Text = "Print My Journal";
var PrintTakeActionsOnly_Text = "Print My Actions";

Mike

Hi Mike

Thanks for getting back to me!  I've tested your new file and it works fine now :) 

That's fabulous :D

Nic

Great, Nicola. I have updated the live LearningJournal.js file to this new version.

Mike

Hey Nic

Am trying to get my head around these files and how to manipulate them - I noticed that you have altered the font.... any tips on that? I have tried a few things but it didn't work - keep in mind I have NO idea about these things... seems stupid to have to pay a developer to do just that for me but will if we need to....

Thanks Michelle

Hi Mike

Me again! I just found this thread where you are talking about emailing the journal. The link isn't working for me - I get error 404... are you able to share the file again by any chance? Many thanks.

Regards

Michelle

Hi Michelle,

This is super easy to do with a little CSS.  You need to add some basic css properties to the Learningjournal.css file.  As an example, I changed the journal prompt text to be Open Sans and bold, and to change the color of the prompt box:

.journalentry-prompt {
 color:rgb(85, 54, 132);
 font-family:'Open Sans';
 font-weight: 700;
 margin-bottom:15px;
}

Sometimes you might need to add !important to the end of a property, before the semicolon if your change doesn't work. This happens if another style is applied at a different level than your changes are being made at - which can override your change. The !important attribute will usually work to make your change the prime one.

You can make quite a few changes with CSS.  With this code, I changed the print buttons to:

• Make them purple
• Give them a rounded appearance with the border-radius property
• Changed the text to be uppercase, bold and with font 'Lato'

See below:

.journalprintbutton {
 padding: 5px 10px;
 background-color: #68246d;
 display: inline-block;
 margin-bottom: 15px;
 color: white;
 margin-right: 20px;
 padding-left: 20px;
 padding-right: 20px;
 border-radius:30px;
 font-size:1.2rem;
 text-transform: uppercase;
 font-family: 'Lato';
 font-weight: 700;
}

Michelle,

The email button functionality is found in the newest version. Check the HOW-TO doc for instructions.

Regards,

Mike

I have just found this now and it's exactly what I'm looking for - thank you Mike! I am wondering if you can have multiple journals within a course. I have a Rise course with multiple modules and I would love to have a journal for each module. Is this possible?

Hi Louis

I would suggest that the way to do this would be one journal with a new section per module/chapter?  And then have the download link available at the end? There's probably no harm in having the download button in each module as it would also end up slowly concatenating each section as it was completed?

Nic

Hi Mike... sorry I should have been more specific. I am looking for the journal to be able to be emailed to the individual learner - eg different email address each time. This looks like it will simply email to a hard coded address (not different ones per learner). Hope that this makes sense....

I can't seem to get this to work at all. I'm pretty sure I've followed your exact instructions however after I upload the new Zip file to the LMS, I'm still just getting Note boxes. Help!

Did you add the journal entries correctly? Did you alter the index file? Did you add the JavaScript and CSS files to the SCORM package?

Yes.  Did all those steps correctly I think.  Sorry for not giving much description before. It's hard as I don't know where I went wrong.  Here's a few questions/considerations:

1. Do the notes have to be case sensitive?
2. When creating the notes does it matter if you do a soft return or hard return (When I do a hard return, the note shows the PLUS sign.
3. Probably due to security, my work laptop wouldn't let me strictly download the JS file so I opened it instead and saved it in Notepad with the extension of JS.  Will that be an issue?
4. The CSS file saved itself as TXT. I figured that wouldn't work so I also opened it in Notepad and saved it as CSS instead. 
5. Does it matter what scorm type/version I output to (Scorm 2004 / 1.2)?

Let me know if any of those steps would have broken it.  I did add the code to the HTML file exactly as indicated and re-zipped the package exactly as indicated though.

Hey Adam. How did you go? I’ve now got the same issue. It was working previously and I republished the module and now it’s not 😭

Hey Nic. Have you had any issues with republished modules? was working prior to Xmas but needed to do updates so republished and now it’s not. Have even rolled back the font changes and used the files linked above??? Am sure it’s something I’m missing but am stumped!