Students claiming they cannot access the materials when I have invited them

I am running Open edX on Amazon Web Services. My courses are all invitation-only because I require that people pay first before being added. About 80-90% of the time I have no issues adding students to the course. Every so often I get a student who writes me complaining that they still can’t access the course materials, even though I know I have invited them.

I look up their email under Student Admin and it will say “not enrolled, never registered” but then this one particular student actually sent me a screenshot of himself logged with a Dashboard message “You have not enrolled in any courses yet.” Obviously they have registered, or they couldn’t show me their account dashboard. And I added their email address to the course multiple times, and it just doesn’t seem to be “taking.”

What am I doing wrong? What could be going on here?

Maybe the student is doing something wrong on their end? What could I suggest to them?

Hey @ginasciworthy, long time no see!

I have not run into this issue myself, but from what you describe, this is the point where I would typically start looking at the edx-platform logs (usually in /edx/var/log/lms/edx.log) to try and figure out what happened with this particular user. Any error messages during the sign-up process would be telling. Is this something you have access to?

I might. Our sys-admin probably can access it. We installed it ourselves so most likely. I’ll try this and report back.

Just to check: is there any chance the student has multiple email addresses? Sometimes people use the Google login or something like that and they don’t even realize that they registered with a different email address than they are using to communicate with you.

This appears to have been the problem with a few of them. They get an invite to their school email and then register with their personal email. I’ve been trying to make sure to tell them that they need to use the email their invite was sent to, but not everybody follows directions. =)

Still not sure what happened with a couple of others. One issue I found out is that the system appeared to have been replacing their email username (the thing before the @) with a weird number. For example the student’s email would be abc3726@school.edu and the system changed it to g410001829@school.edu. I got 20 or so emails (most of the class) showing that they’d all requested to change their email addresses from this weird number to their correct email. Weirdly, I never invited them with anything other than the abc3726@school.edu addresses, and I have still not figured out where on Earth this weird g number came from.

My only suspicion is that the way their school sets up email accounts is wonky and there’s some kind of “mask” and that abc3728 format is not their true account ID and for some reason my learn site detected that. But that barely makes sense. I work with multiple schools so I’m about to invite another school this week to see if the same thing happens. Will report back.

Also…I do not appear to have access to any session logs as you suggested in your initial message.

(I have a lot of issues with my learn site, and I’m going to make separate posts about them shortly.)