Our instructors are not full-time; they’re just volunteer content creators. So a problem we have right now is that once they put up their class, they forget to come back and check the forums. Then students post questions there and never get a reply. This leads to a bad experience, and students leaving the platform.
Is there a way or any plans to add a way for instructors to get emails about students posting to discussion forums in their class? (Alternatively, I feel like maybe I saw in the past that there was a proposal to throw away the current discussion forums tech and replace it with Discuss or something similar, since people didn’t want to fix its problems. Has there been any movement on that front instead?)
There is the email digest feature you can enable from the discussions tab, but I’ve never managed to make it work for me so I can’t be sure if it’s what you are looking for.
However you can from your course’s instructor dashboard, you can use the bulk emails feature.
You can even schedule several emails ahead (e.g. every 1/2 week), it’s just not periodical so you have to do many of them in advance.
However, if you need a custom email, you need to edit the codebase to trigger the email sending from a specific Django signal (ex. your topics get a new reply).
I’m certainly willing to give it a try. Any pointers to the “you need to edit the codebase to trigger the email sending from a specific Django signal (ex. your topics get a new reply).” portion though?
No, I haven’t found a way to do this yet. They seem to be working on a new discussion front end that’s different from the tutor forum plugin, but I don’t know if that will make any difference for this.