Add an option to email reflections to a user

Feature Requests
1

Reflections are one of the most powerful learning tools in Evolve. If you can persuade a user to think about something and make some notes about it, or even an action plan, you can elevate e-learning to another level. The Reflections extension is potentially fantastic for this, but it needs some love.

At the moment…

  1. You have to ensure that users download the PDF. That’s far from foolproof.
  2. If they do download it, depending on their browser and other settings, they might not notice they have downloaded it. They then need to move it from their downloads folder to somewhere they might be able to find it again, which is probably unlikely.
  3. Printing PDFs is expensive, inconvenient and bad for the environment.

So what if there was an option to email it to yourself? That would make it more noticeable and more likely to be actionable. You could even add an option to delay delivery for a period of time so you could send your future self a note or other reminder. You could also have an option to CC in someone like your manager who could check in with you to discuss the action plan you just made as part of the course. This could aid learning transfer, which is pretty hard to achieve in most e-learning.

4 Likes
2

This would be fantastic! Really allows for deeper learning beyond quiz questions/assessments.

3

Unfortunately this is not particularly straightforward because sending an email is something that has to be done by a server - but when Evolve content is published for SCORM/xAPI/Web it has no idea or control over what server it is running on.

Whilst it is possible to put mailto links into content to trigger the user’s email client to create a new email - and even populate it with subject and body (to a limited extent) it’s not possible to add an attachment. Nor to force the email to be sent.

One option would be to allow the Reflection extension to be configure to use a 3rd party service like mailgun but that’s not going to be that straightforward for most people.

You have to ensure that users download the PDF

This happens automatically (on desktop browsers) when ‘Reflection Document Format’ is set to PDF. It may that your browser will also open the PDF automatically once downloaded but it does definitely download it first.

1 Like
4

How about a Zapier integration? -That would be amazing!

5

That’s an interesting idea for sure… if you could tie it in with Evolve’s Logic functionality that could allow for some pretty cool functionality.

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6

Hey Sam,

I’ve built a course with Jotform in an iframe that emails the user’s notes to the user and another person they choose to share them with. Works a treat. Gimmie a shout if you want to see the build.

Best,
Andy

2 Likes
7

I’d love to see this if you don’t mind.

8

Here you go. I cannot share the whole course, so I’ve put a clone of the form into an Evolve build with just an iframe component in it. https://juvolearningsolutions.evolveauthoring.com/courses/630e1eff91c75107ea2844f3/preview/index.html?isShared=true

1 Like
9

Super cool! Thanks for sharing.

10

That’s an awesome solution Andy. Thanks for sharing. Does it work ok behind a firewall on your typical corporate LMS?

11

Hey, Sam, in my use case it’s fine; it was deployed on SuccessFactors in 15 languages around the globe. The Client didn’t need to whitelist anything. However, this may not be the case for all IT setups. @hbailey could an Evolve component be created that replicates the function–it appears the demand is there?

1 Like