Notification setting to notify when user is added to a course

Idea created by mdeeprose on Dec 5, 2018

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Reviewed by Product Management

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The notification system has lots of useful notifications, but one that I feel is missing is to notify a user when they are added to a course.

Sometimes our users don't notice or realise they have been added to a course until they have received an announcement or email from it. This means they could have lost some valuable time to make use of the course.

The notification system allows administrators to enforce/disable notifications and choose whether users can enable or disable them, so this additional notification would not introduce any extra unneccesary emails - they would be just as configurable as other existing notifications.

I believe this would be useful for both instructors and students. I have one particular use case for this from a project I am doing. When staff report they cannot see a course in Blackboard it is because they have not been listed in our central database (Banner) as teaching it. Once they are listed in Banner they will be automatically added to the Blackboard course within 24 hours (we update three times daily against Banner). I have done some measurements and found it can take instructors an average of 5 days (lowest recorded time 13 minutes and longest recorded time 33 days) from being added to the course in Blackboard and accessing it.

If they received an email telling them they now had access to the course they would probably access it more quickly on average than if they did not have a notification.

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dg35344 Dec 5, 2018 6:40 AM

Hi Matt,

thanks for your feedback on this. This is something that we have brought to the email notification settings within Ultra, allowing both students and staff to select to receive email alerts on New Courses Available. We are improving the settings in this area at present to support more granular permissions in Ultra, and as such I will engage with our wider PM team to see if we can bring this functionality to Learn Original.

Dom

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mdeeprose @ dg35344 on Dec 5, 2018 7:20 AM

That would be great Dominic Gore! In case it is of interest I analysed a small number of tickets where staff reported they could not see their Blackboard course and took some timings:

-From the ticket being resolve to it being closed

-From the ticket being closed to the updated data being sent from Banner to Blackboard

-The the data being sent to Blackboard to being processed by Blackboard SIS (we drop flat files and then process them via SIS using a cron job

-From the data being processed to the instructor actually accessing the course

This box plot shows those timings:

In case that helps make the case to your colleagues in the product team. I'm also sharing because I like box plots

Also because the staff have to contact their faculty office to get the data corrected some never bother (27 raised the issue but only 23 got the data corrected) so I'm looking at improving that element too.

We had 207 tickets raised where staff couldn't see their course due to not being listed in Banner as teaching it in 2016/17 and 149 in 2018/19 so it does have an impact at our institution...

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gw0046349 Dec 5, 2018 8:20 AM

We have notifications going to students from our SIS, and don't need it in Blackboard, but I can attest this is useful to students. We also have notifications if the student is removed, has self-dropped, if the course has been canceled or had date changes. Instructor notifications also go out. If we end up getting notifications in Blackboard, I would advise - STRONGLY ADVISE in fact - that this notification type be independently configurable in Blackboard. While we want notifications on in general in Blackboard, but we will not want duplicate notifications going out.

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3 Comments

dg35344 Dec 5, 2018 6:40 AM
Hi Matt,

thanks for your feedback on this. This is something that we have brought to the email notification settings within Ultra, allowing both students and staff to select to receive email alerts on New Courses Available. We are improving the settings in this area at present to support more granular permissions in Ultra, and as such I will engage with our wider PM team to see if we can bring this functionality to Learn Original.

Dom
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- mdeeprose @ dg35344 on Dec 5, 2018 7:20 AM
  That would be great Dominic Gore! In case it is of interest I analysed a small number of tickets where staff reported they could not see their Blackboard course and took some timings:
  -From the ticket being resolve to it being closed
  -From the ticket being closed to the updated data being sent from Banner to Blackboard
  -The the data being sent to Blackboard to being processed by Blackboard SIS (we drop flat files and then process them via SIS using a cron job
  -From the data being processed to the instructor actually accessing the course
  
  This box plot shows those timings:
  
  In case that helps make the case to your colleagues in the product team. I'm also sharing because I like box plots
  Also because the staff have to contact their faculty office to get the data corrected some never bother (27 raised the issue but only 23 got the data corrected) so I'm looking at improving that element too.
  
  We had 207 tickets raised where staff couldn't see their course due to not being listed in Banner as teaching it in 2016/17 and 149 in 2018/19 so it does have an impact at our institution...
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gw0046349 Dec 5, 2018 8:20 AM
We have notifications going to students from our SIS, and don't need it in Blackboard, but I can attest this is useful to students. We also have notifications if the student is removed, has self-dropped, if the course has been canceled or had date changes. Instructor notifications also go out. If we end up getting notifications in Blackboard, I would advise - STRONGLY ADVISE in fact - that this notification type be independently configurable in Blackboard. While we want notifications on in general in Blackboard, but we will not want duplicate notifications going out.
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Notification setting to notify when user is added to a course

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