Provide a built-in „Download all …“ routine in core and address it for a functionality for students (and more)

The idea for this request starts with students mentioning their requirement to be able to download all course materials. Notably in the Moodle app this is possible, whereas in web browser that does not exist.
Some plug-ins do help: https://github.com/TUM-MZ/moodle-block_material-download (not in the official repository) and https://moodle.org/plugins/local_downloadcenter.

Note this is not a request to add either one or the other cited plugin as-is.

This proposal goes beyond this, however, identifying other areas – sometimes switching to the teacher point of view:

If this proposal was realized there would maybe be the
ability to …

• … download all materials of a course
• … download all files of an assignment (that does exist)
• … download all files of a glossary
• … download all files submitted in a workshop
• … download all files of a quizzes essay question (see MDL-58944: essay question, download all submitted files as well as https://moodle.org/plugins/quiz_downloadsubmissions)
• ...
… and this always respecting the status (hidden, unavailable) of the respective files, of course.

Wouldn't it be great to address all this through the use of a centralized routine without a lot of code duplication?

Summary
Project size: medium
Audience: primary schools, universities, work places
Target users: teachers, students

Goals
Newly established and/or re-written „Download all …“ functionalities in Moodle

User Stories
As a student, I should be able to download all materials of a Moodle course at once.

The use case is mainly, when a lecturer tells me that course access will be closed in a week's time because the term is ending. Then, as a student, I want to download all materials so I can access them later on. Note this does not download other people's workshop submissions, assignment submissions or stuff like this. It does download the course materials the student has access to at the time of the download, as zip archive, subfolders representing the course sections.

As a teacher, I should be able to coursewise disable the „download all materials of a Moodle course at once“ option for a given Moodle course.

If I don't want that function to be available in my course, I can deactivate it. If the „download all materials of a Moodle course at once“ is set, though, it gets all course materials the student has access to at the time of the download. The possibility to explicitly exclude some files is not given, hence the "Download all..." title really nails it. Skilled students can bypass all sorts of download limitations anyway. So there's not clue in trying to impede the download of some files you have added to your course for your students to view.

As a teacher, I should be able to download all materials submitted in a quizzes essay questions.

Right now, there is no function to download all materials submitted via a quiz essay question. If, as teacher, I want to grade offline or pass the submitted files to a mechanism, I have to very cumbersomely download each submission single-handedly. Only teacher with the right to grade are allowed to download those submitted files.

As a teacher, I should be able to download all materials submitted in a workshop.

Right now, there is no function to download all materials which has been submitted in a workshop activity. If, as teacher, I want to get an overview of all submitted files, I have to very cumbersomely download each submission single-handedly. Only teacher with the right to see students workshop actions are allowed to download those submitted files.

As a student or teacher, I should be able to download all materials listed in a glossary.

If a glossary is set up to achieve a materials collections and contributors do upload such files, there is the wish to be enabled to download them, too. It is very cumbersome to have to go single-handedly download each one of them. A download all files functionality is helping a lot.

Links to existing tracker issues, forum discussions, contrib plugins

https://github.com/TUM-MZ/moodle-block_material-download
https://moodle.org/plugins/local_downloadcenter
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-58944
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-40879
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-49585
https://moodle.org/plugins/quiz_downloadsubmissions
https://github.com/julenpardo/moodle-local_resourceexporter

Requirements

Further reading