Hi,
Students that have hidden their email address don't receive any forum emails (moodle v.1.4.1)! I don't think the noreplyaddress setting in the moodle variables setup works at all.
Is this really the intended behavior?
This takes the effect out of the "Forced subscription" forum option. The instructor can no longer be sure that all students get an email copy of news forum posts. I would definitely prefer that all students receive email notification of posts to forced forums, whether the address is hidden or not.
Lars.
Lars,
Actually, I have the opposite problem. Most of my students use their cell phone mail for communication with the teacher and I want them to be able to turn off their mail and not get messages.
The reason is that cell phone e-mail here (Japan) can't handle Moddle's mail. Students get a strange mail that it is impossible to read. This is especiall a problem for me.
Not sure about the forced subscription issue but I think that giving the students more control over mail management might have some benefits. I wouldn't want to loose it. But then again, it would be good for the teacher to have more control too
Actually, I have the opposite problem. Most of my students use their cell phone mail for communication with the teacher and I want them to be able to turn off their mail and not get messages.
The reason is that cell phone e-mail here (Japan) can't handle Moddle's mail. Students get a strange mail that it is impossible to read. This is especiall a problem for me.
Not sure about the forced subscription issue but I think that giving the students more control over mail management might have some benefits. I wouldn't want to loose it. But then again, it would be good for the teacher to have more control too
There are TWO settings in the profile editing page ... make sure you're using the right one.
Clicking the little envelope next to the address on the main profile page itself is a shortcut that actually controls the activation (not the display). The tooltips there explain this.
Email display - simply controls visibility of the address to others.
Email activated - will disable all email being sent to that address.
Email activated - will disable all email being sent to that address.
Clicking the little envelope next to the address on the main profile page itself is a shortcut that actually controls the activation (not the display). The tooltips there explain this.
Hi Martin,
Thanks! I hadn't noticed the Email activated field.
One problem with the way this works is that this setting is controlled by the user. I agree that Email display should be controlled by the user, but ideally, the instructor should have the ability of deciding whether the Email activated feature is available to students. Otherwise the assurance the instructor has, that students receive important forum messages, disappears.
What is the default behavior of these fields?
It seems like once a student clicks the little envelope icon to turn off Email display then Email activated is set to disabled. As it is now, I don't think students know exactly what they are turning off when they click the envelope icon. (Perhaps this icon ought to be removed, so the student is required to go into their profile and turn settings off there. This way they'll know exactly what they are turning off.) In my opinion, the preferred behavior would be that students have to manually turn off both. Otherwise the "forced subscription" forum property looses its potency. Another possible behavior is that if an instructor creates a forum and turns on forced subscription, then the Email activated setting for all students should change to enabled, so students that had disabled this feature will have to manually disable it again. Same behavior would be preferred when an instructor manually adds a student to a forum.
(Students have always had the ability to get around receiving forum mails by editing their original email address and entering a non-existent address. So in some sense the Email activated feature is unnecessary.) In my opinion the best solution would be to get rid of Email activated.
What happens if a student with Email activated set to disabled, tries to use the "Send my details via email" feature to get a forgotten password?
Lars.
Thanks! I hadn't noticed the Email activated field.
One problem with the way this works is that this setting is controlled by the user. I agree that Email display should be controlled by the user, but ideally, the instructor should have the ability of deciding whether the Email activated feature is available to students. Otherwise the assurance the instructor has, that students receive important forum messages, disappears.
What is the default behavior of these fields?
It seems like once a student clicks the little envelope icon to turn off Email display then Email activated is set to disabled. As it is now, I don't think students know exactly what they are turning off when they click the envelope icon. (Perhaps this icon ought to be removed, so the student is required to go into their profile and turn settings off there. This way they'll know exactly what they are turning off.) In my opinion, the preferred behavior would be that students have to manually turn off both. Otherwise the "forced subscription" forum property looses its potency. Another possible behavior is that if an instructor creates a forum and turns on forced subscription, then the Email activated setting for all students should change to enabled, so students that had disabled this feature will have to manually disable it again. Same behavior would be preferred when an instructor manually adds a student to a forum.
(Students have always had the ability to get around receiving forum mails by editing their original email address and entering a non-existent address. So in some sense the Email activated feature is unnecessary.) In my opinion the best solution would be to get rid of Email activated.
What happens if a student with Email activated set to disabled, tries to use the "Send my details via email" feature to get a forgotten password?
Lars.
If someone really doesn't want to get mail, then it shouldn't be forced on them. How would you feel if I started spamming you from this site, for example, and you had no way to opt out? If a student chooses not to get mail from a teacher then forcing mail on them is not going to help the situation.
Some confusion: The little envelope icon is nothing to do with email display ... it is purely for email activation. A non-displayed address is simply not displayed at all. It probably makes sense to get rid of that icon-click shortcut completely for students if it causes confusion.
As an admin I use it all the time, everytime someone here has a bad email address or full mailbox (because as admin I get all their bounces). Once they fix their address they can turn it on again themselves - without losing any of their subscriptions.
Some confusion: The little envelope icon is nothing to do with email display ... it is purely for email activation. A non-displayed address is simply not displayed at all. It probably makes sense to get rid of that icon-click shortcut completely for students if it causes confusion.
As an admin I use it all the time, everytime someone here has a bad email address or full mailbox (because as admin I get all their bounces). Once they fix their address they can turn it on again themselves - without losing any of their subscriptions.
It is important, for the sake of the students, that the teacher always be able to contact them directly. Imagine there is an exam scheduled for the next day, but a snowstorm occurs that causes the school or university to shut down, and the teacher has no way to inform the student the new arrangements for the exam. Or an earthquake 7.4 on the Richter scale occurs the night before the exam, and it is announced on the television that the university will be closed the next day, and then fifteen minutes later it is announced on the television that it wil be open, and students aren't sure whether the exam will happen as scheduled or not because in spite of the fact that the university plans to go on with classes the next day, one of the major bridges in the region has collapsed and it could prevent the professor from coming to work depending on where he lived, and the teacher has no way to reach them to tell them whether he has cancelled their exam or whether it will be happening, so the students have study anyway even though they have been traumatized by the experience they have just been through, only to show up the next day and find it has been rescheduled and then they have to study all over again the next week.
Farfetched? The latter happened to me in my first semester of college 15 years ago and I will never forget it was one of the worst nights of my life. It would have given me a lot of peace of mind that night if I had known our professor was going to cancel our exam the next day, but how was he supposed to contact 200 students to tell them that? Or does he have to wait for 200 students to contact him individually and email them one by one?
The moral of the story? The teacher need a way to be able to contact all their students simultaneously in times of need. If we can require students to take exams and complete certain requirements, I don't see why requiring them to receive important emails from the teacher is spam.
Farfetched? The latter happened to me in my first semester of college 15 years ago and I will never forget it was one of the worst nights of my life. It would have given me a lot of peace of mind that night if I had known our professor was going to cancel our exam the next day, but how was he supposed to contact 200 students to tell them that? Or does he have to wait for 200 students to contact him individually and email them one by one?
The moral of the story? The teacher need a way to be able to contact all their students simultaneously in times of need. If we can require students to take exams and complete certain requirements, I don't see why requiring them to receive important emails from the teacher is spam.
PS-And what about us who will be teaching courses that are fully online and who will have students all over the globe? How else are we supposed to keep in touch with them?
Sigh, relax please, you're off down some other garden path here, n ... Moodle has forced-subscription forums for news and exactly these scenarios. Students who want to be part of a course are not going to disable their email.
If you don't want students to disable their email then just, ooh, ask them not to
If you force email on people who really don't want it then they'll just change the address to something bogus and not only will you get more bounces but you won't be able to mail them even individually. Or they'll filter you out (as spam) in their clients.
If you don't want students to disable their email then just, ooh, ask them not to
If you force email on people who really don't want it then they'll just change the address to something bogus and not only will you get more bounces but you won't be able to mail them even individually. Or they'll filter you out (as spam) in their clients.
Well, I plan on using forced subscriptions sparingly, and probably only in the news forum of paid courses I offer, not freely available ones, so I think if people pay for a course they want to be able to receive email from the course (so I can notify them if for some reason my site will be down for an upgrade or something, rather than leaving them in the lurch wondering whether their money disappeared into thin air with the site). However, it's not only a matter of the teacher being able to contact the student, it's as some have pointed out, having the ability to get your password if you forget it or to have the ability to enroll in new courses, and for students who don't bother to read the help item associated with this and don't understand what it is or who just click on the envelope without knowing what they are doing, or students who don't understand that if they subscribe to a forum but block their email, they won't get email from the forum. If students don't want to be subscribed to forums they have subscribed to (and I don't plan on making subscription the default for anything but news forums), then they can unsubscribe themselves from those particular forums.
Really, I don't have any intention of spamming students. I simply want to make administering their accounts more logical and easy for them, and to save myself the trouble of having to help students who unwittingly stop receiving email and ask me what is going on. I just try to put myself in the shoes of someone who has never used Moodle before and try to think whether it would make sense to them.
In any case, I took a look at the code that controls this last night. It looks simple enough to hack so that admins still can have the ability to stop email to bouncing addresses as you describe, but take the ability to completely block all email away from students, and just leave them the ability to control their subscriptions to individual forums. I'll post my changes here if anyone else is interested in adding this to their Moodle.
Really, I don't have any intention of spamming students. I simply want to make administering their accounts more logical and easy for them, and to save myself the trouble of having to help students who unwittingly stop receiving email and ask me what is going on. I just try to put myself in the shoes of someone who has never used Moodle before and try to think whether it would make sense to them.
In any case, I took a look at the code that controls this last night. It looks simple enough to hack so that admins still can have the ability to stop email to bouncing addresses as you describe, but take the ability to completely block all email away from students, and just leave them the ability to control their subscriptions to individual forums. I'll post my changes here if anyone else is interested in adding this to their Moodle.
They can still retrieve their password (or at least they can in 1.4.2 because a bug was fixed). They can enrol in new courses. Disabling email doesn't stop these things.
You can of course change your own site to do what you want, but I think once you actually are starting to use your site for teaching real students you will want to rethink this issue.
You can of course change your own site to do what you want, but I think once you actually are starting to use your site for teaching real students you will want to rethink this issue.
When I taught online before, and when other people at my institute taught courses online, students were not allowed to unenroll from the email discussion list (there were no online forums though). The course discussion lists generated quite a bit of email (although a digest was an option too), but not a single student complained about being forced to participate in the discussion, or at least to follow it even if they didn't participate (which was a small minority). But we also had strict rules which we enforced about not posting gratuitous "I agree" kinds of posts and encouraged students to send only one email a day covering the various topics they wanted to discuss so that it didn't get too out of hand. I think to some extent setting groundrules similar to this is more important for making students feel they aren't being spammed than technological solutions. If they know every time they open an email it is going to have some substance to it then they are less likely to feel spammed.
If there are discussion forums online available, I agree it should be optional to also receive email, but I think for course news, I think it is essential that a teacher be able to reach all of their students. And I don't think any student would complain, as long as the teacher used the the course news in a reasonable way.
Actually the thing I find more spam-like is the fact that the default is to subscribe people to forums whenever they post to one. It took me a while to figure this out myself and I still occasionally receive emails from various Moodle forums that I posted to before I figured how to shut this off.
Oh well, I guess it just is a matter of opinion.
If there are discussion forums online available, I agree it should be optional to also receive email, but I think for course news, I think it is essential that a teacher be able to reach all of their students. And I don't think any student would complain, as long as the teacher used the the course news in a reasonable way.
Actually the thing I find more spam-like is the fact that the default is to subscribe people to forums whenever they post to one. It took me a while to figure this out myself and I still occasionally receive emails from various Moodle forums that I posted to before I figured how to shut this off.
Oh well, I guess it just is a matter of opinion.
Hi N, Martin, Lars and Bob
As you say in your post, "Farfetched? The latter happened to me in my first semester of college 15 years ago". So I presume it has not happened since. As a teacher I doubt whether your main concern would be if the exam takes place, more a point of how is the community going to cope?
Personally I need the facility to disable student's email addresses. More than 50% of my students do not have email addresses, so they have inputted their address as theirname@example.com. I can't force them to have a Hotmail or Yahoo account, they all have college email accounts, but they are only in college one day a week and have no access to their college email from home. This facility is necessary for those of us trying to introduce blended learning into the classroom, the last thing I want to do is frighten them off by forcing them to have an external email address.
Martin, please retain this facility for the sake of new comers to e-learning, blended learning.
Regards
Dave 
Actually, after I posted that I thought of several things that happened before and after that that would fall into the same category...Floods in high school that caused my school to close for three days and I spent three nights studying for the same exam because they didn't announce the closures until the morning, and another case when I was in grad school when I was a TA that is too long to explain here but involved the professor breaking her leg and me having to take over the teaching of the class for six weeks.
I can understand if you are teaching a classroom course that you have alternative ways to reach your students, but in my case my students will be all over the globe and their email will be the only way I can reach them directly. I think it is a courtesy of me to them to make sure that I can reach them when I have important information for them. Since many of my students will be enrolled in a free course before they enroll in a paid course, it would be an absolute disaster if those students had disabled email and paid for their courses and then received nothing about how to enter the courses they paid for. They would think the whole thing was a scam!
My point is not to say that one way is better than another, but that there are good arguments for both options.
I can understand if you are teaching a classroom course that you have alternative ways to reach your students, but in my case my students will be all over the globe and their email will be the only way I can reach them directly. I think it is a courtesy of me to them to make sure that I can reach them when I have important information for them. Since many of my students will be enrolled in a free course before they enroll in a paid course, it would be an absolute disaster if those students had disabled email and paid for their courses and then received nothing about how to enter the courses they paid for. They would think the whole thing was a scam!
My point is not to say that one way is better than another, but that there are good arguments for both options.
The key word here is option.
All of my administrators have access to my classes... they don't want emails from the forums swamping their boxes from forum postings. And, I don't want them having to set that param. That is an option I need to have control over. Strong and specific control over the email functions are definitely needed; the more options the better.
dgd
All of my administrators have access to my classes... they don't want emails from the forums swamping their boxes from forum postings. And, I don't want them having to set that param. That is an option I need to have control over. Strong and specific control over the email functions are definitely needed; the more options the better.
dgd
Hi Dennis,
You're right. The point here is that it is the instructor that has the flexibility. The instructor is the one to decide if students shall receive essential course related information via e-mail. The instructor is the one that permits students to refuse email notification.
After all, the instructor is the one that runs the class. Students that sign up are subject to the rules and regulations laid down by the instructor. The student that can't accept these, has the option of unenrolling from the course.
Lars.
You're right. The point here is that it is the instructor that has the flexibility. The instructor is the one to decide if students shall receive essential course related information via e-mail. The instructor is the one that permits students to refuse email notification.
After all, the instructor is the one that runs the class. Students that sign up are subject to the rules and regulations laid down by the instructor. The student that can't accept these, has the option of unenrolling from the course.
Lars.
Is this option, or something like it, going to be in the main Moodle distribution? I was just about to write up some instructions on how Moodle can replace a standard mailing list for notifying all students when my colleague pointed out that students can silently remove themselves from it.
Even if you take the view that students should control their own email (and I am sympathetic to that) currently there is no way for students to easily switch off all but 'important' emails, so they either get bombarded with email or they get none at all. Is there some compromise postion?
There could be a checkbox at the bottom of the teacher's text entry areas in 'subscribe all' forums to override any other options and ensure that the post goes to everyone in 'emergencies'.
This combined with three stages of email activation: * all mail * no mail from optional forums * no mail from any forum
Alternatively, is there an easy way to see who on your course is 'de-activated'? Maybe a warning: "3 students and 1 teacher will not receive this post via email" with a clickable link to see who they are.
(N Hansen mentioned that people are unaware of the auto-subscribe feature. I've found this to be true with my colleagues. Perhaps there could be an explanatory note on the first email from a forum after being auto-subscribed explaining why the email is being sent and where to change the option?)
I agree with Lars. I think this is a fatal flaw. There may be times when it is absolutely necessary for the teacher to email their students. Is there a hack that one can perform to get rid of this option altogether?
As promised, here are the hacks you need to do if you want to prevent students from enabling/disabling their email. Implementing these hacks means that you can be assured that if you force subscription to a forum, that your students will receive the messages by email.
A warning though-if you implement this on an already operating Moodle, you may still have some students who do not receive email, because this hack simply takes away their ability to change their status, and does not reset everyone to enabled email. That would probably require another hack of some kind. Therefore, I can only vouch for this hack on a new Moodle installation.
In my case, I wanted to keep the ability to disable a students' email in the hands of editing teachers and admins. This means that you can still block bouncing email addresses.
There are two files you need to hack. They are both in the user folder.
The first is view.php.
Find the following line:
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or $currentuser) { /// Can use the enable/disable email stuff
And replace it with
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or isadmin()) { /// Can use the enable/disable email stuff
If you were to want to restrict this ability to the teacher or the admin only, then just take out the or and leave only isteacheredit($course->id) or isadmin() between the parentheses.
The above hack will display the little envelope only if the person viewing the profile page is an editing teacher or an admin.
If you want to get rid of the envelope icon altogether because you find it confusing and just allow whomever you wish to allow to enable/disable from the edit profile page, then you need to delete the following:
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or $currentuser) { /// Can use the enable/disable email stuff
if (!empty($_GET['enable'])) { /// Recieved a paramter to enable the email address
set_field('user', 'emailstop', 0, 'id', $user->id);
$user->emailstop = 0;
}
if (!empty($_GET['disable'])) { /// Recieved a paramter to disable the email address
set_field('user', 'emailstop', 1, 'id', $user->id);
$user->emailstop = 1;
}
if ($user->emailstop) {
$switchparam = 'enable';
$switchtitle = get_string('emaildisable');
$switchclick = get_string('emailenableclick');
$switchpix = 'emailno.gif';
} else {
$switchparam = 'disable';
$switchtitle = get_string('emailenable');
$switchclick = get_string('emaildisableclick');
$switchpix = 'email.gif';
}
$emailswitch = " <a title=\"$switchclick\" ".
"href=\"view.php?id=$user->id&course=$course->id&$switchparam=$user->id\">".
"<img border=\"0\" width=11 height=11 src=\"$CFG->pixpath/t/$switchpix\"></a>";
} else {
$emailswitch = '';
}
print_row(get_string("email").":", obfuscate_mailto($user->email, '', $user->emailstop)."$emailswitch");
}
The other file you need to edit to limit disabling/enabling of email to admins and editing teachers is edit.html. Look for the following lines:
<tr valign=top>
<td align=right><p><?php print_string("emailactive") ?>:</td>
<td><?php
unset($choices);
$choices["0"] = get_string("emailenable");
$choices["1"] = get_string("emaildisable");
choose_from_menu ($choices, "emailstop", $user->emailstop, "") ?>
</td>
</tr>
And replace them with the following:
<?php
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or isadmin()) {?>
<tr valign=top>
<td align=right><p><?php print_string("emailactive") ?>:</td>
<td><?php
unset($choices);
$choices["0"] = get_string("emailenable");
$choices["1"] = get_string("emaildisable");
choose_from_menu ($choices, "emailstop", $user->emailstop, "") ?>
</td>
</tr>
<?php } ?>
This will display the enable/disable option on the profile editing page only when the person viewing it is an editing teacher or admin. Otherwise, neither the options nor the current setting will be visible to the student.
A warning though-if you implement this on an already operating Moodle, you may still have some students who do not receive email, because this hack simply takes away their ability to change their status, and does not reset everyone to enabled email. That would probably require another hack of some kind. Therefore, I can only vouch for this hack on a new Moodle installation.
In my case, I wanted to keep the ability to disable a students' email in the hands of editing teachers and admins. This means that you can still block bouncing email addresses.
There are two files you need to hack. They are both in the user folder.
The first is view.php.
Find the following line:
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or $currentuser) { /// Can use the enable/disable email stuff
And replace it with
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or isadmin()) { /// Can use the enable/disable email stuff
If you were to want to restrict this ability to the teacher or the admin only, then just take out the or and leave only isteacheredit($course->id) or isadmin() between the parentheses.
The above hack will display the little envelope only if the person viewing the profile page is an editing teacher or an admin.
If you want to get rid of the envelope icon altogether because you find it confusing and just allow whomever you wish to allow to enable/disable from the edit profile page, then you need to delete the following:
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or $currentuser) { /// Can use the enable/disable email stuff
if (!empty($_GET['enable'])) { /// Recieved a paramter to enable the email address
set_field('user', 'emailstop', 0, 'id', $user->id);
$user->emailstop = 0;
}
if (!empty($_GET['disable'])) { /// Recieved a paramter to disable the email address
set_field('user', 'emailstop', 1, 'id', $user->id);
$user->emailstop = 1;
}
if ($user->emailstop) {
$switchparam = 'enable';
$switchtitle = get_string('emaildisable');
$switchclick = get_string('emailenableclick');
$switchpix = 'emailno.gif';
} else {
$switchparam = 'disable';
$switchtitle = get_string('emailenable');
$switchclick = get_string('emaildisableclick');
$switchpix = 'email.gif';
}
$emailswitch = " <a title=\"$switchclick\" ".
"href=\"view.php?id=$user->id&course=$course->id&$switchparam=$user->id\">".
"<img border=\"0\" width=11 height=11 src=\"$CFG->pixpath/t/$switchpix\"></a>";
} else {
$emailswitch = '';
}
print_row(get_string("email").":", obfuscate_mailto($user->email, '', $user->emailstop)."$emailswitch");
}
The other file you need to edit to limit disabling/enabling of email to admins and editing teachers is edit.html. Look for the following lines:
<tr valign=top>
<td align=right><p><?php print_string("emailactive") ?>:</td>
<td><?php
unset($choices);
$choices["0"] = get_string("emailenable");
$choices["1"] = get_string("emaildisable");
choose_from_menu ($choices, "emailstop", $user->emailstop, "") ?>
</td>
</tr>
And replace them with the following:
<?php
if (isteacheredit($course->id) or isadmin()) {?>
<tr valign=top>
<td align=right><p><?php print_string("emailactive") ?>:</td>
<td><?php
unset($choices);
$choices["0"] = get_string("emailenable");
$choices["1"] = get_string("emaildisable");
choose_from_menu ($choices, "emailstop", $user->emailstop, "") ?>
</td>
</tr>
<?php } ?>
This will display the enable/disable option on the profile editing page only when the person viewing it is an editing teacher or admin. Otherwise, neither the options nor the current setting will be visible to the student.