Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Nick Varney -
Number of replies: 8

Hi, I really hope I can find the answer to this perennial problem for us.

We have large courses containing multiple teaching groups and teachers.  Currently all 'teachers' receive an assignment notification for every assignment in the course where notify graders is set to on. We want to limit assignment notifications to graders of the teaching groups. How is this done? 

This post says we need to force group mode to 'on' in the course settings. That's fine we can do that. 

But do we need to do more? Do we need to make a teacher a member of the group in order for them to receive the notification and to be the only teacher to receive that notification? 

Or are there some other steps to do? 

Ideally we would like a solution that would work for assignments that all teaching groups can submit to and assignments that have been restricted to individual teaching groups.

As I say we would dearly love to crack this and to avoid the volume of notification emails hitting our inboxes.

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In reply to Nick Varney

Re: Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Nick Varney -
If anyone could help me with this query it would be much appreciated.
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Re: Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Blair F. -
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Nick, did you ever find a solution? I'm joining you in the search. We've assigned the Teachers to their appropriate groups, but all the teachers are still being notified of all the submissions.

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In reply to Blair F.

Re: Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Nick Varney -

I'm afraid not. We are in the same position still with it. It seems rather remarkable that notifications cannot be restricted to teachers of class groups.

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Re: Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Davo Smith -
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If the group setting for the activity is set to 'separate groups', then notifications are only sent to graders (users with capability 'mod/assign:receivegradernotifications') who have at least one group membership (on this course) in common with the user who submitted the assignment. For users who are in no groups (on this course), the notification is sent to any graders who are also not in any groups (on this course).

For all other group settings ('no groups' or 'visible groups'), notifications are sent to all graders on the course.

This is in the code for Moodle 3.9 (although the function has not changed since 2014) and I've not tested it (just read the code).

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In reply to Davo Smith

Re: Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Blair F. -
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Davo, that is exactly how I would expect it to function, but it does not seem to be doing that in our case. I've been testing it for days now. 

  • There are 3 separate groups and 3 teachers. 
  • Each group has ONE teacher in it.
  • The forum is set up to use separate groups.
  • Any post in the forum is sent to all 3 teachers.
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In reply to Blair F.

Re: Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Davo Smith -
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Blair - are you talking about assignments or forums? Up until your post, all the discussion has been about assignments and now you seem to have introduced forums into the discussion.

For forums, as far as I am aware (and without checking the code), the notifications are based on both group membership and the capability 'access all groups' (which teachers have by default). Any user with 'access all groups' will (as far as I can remember) be notified about messages from any group. You need to remove that capability from the teacher role if you don't want teachers to be notified about forum posts from other groups (this will also prevent them from accessing other groups for grading, etc. in other activities).
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In reply to Davo Smith

Re: Notify graders - how to limit the notification to teaching groups

by Nick Varney -
Thank Davo, this is moving things forward in my mind for me (the original poster) and the query I have is most definitely to do with forums. The capability you mention ('access all groups'), can that be removed at course level or does it need to be made site-wide?
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