One regular criticism of Moodle (and course management systems in general) is that the student's work is locked away behind a login screen.

If the student loses access to the course, his or her work and the grades it received become inaccessible. This can happen if the course has an enrollment time limit, or if there's a third-party auth module used and the student is no longer enrolled at the institution.

That's not the case with old-school work done on paper -- graded assignments are handed back to the student with the teacher's comments, and the student is free to keep them forever (for example, I still have some term papers I wrote as an undergraduate, and I'm pretty sure my mother still has some school work that I did as an elementary student :-)).

I propose a feature which allows a student to export all of his or her work in one bundle -- perhaps as a zip file consisting of a set of HTML pages.

Certainly, there's nothing stopping the student from doing this now (by copying and pasting all the messages, for instance), but it's not very convenient to do it by hand.

I wonder if the backup module could be hacked to do this, e.g. take a student ID as a parameter and make a backup consisting of only that student's work?