[Mary]

Dear OpenLab team,

A colleague of mine is trying for the first time to add students to the associated site for his course. He wrote a description of what happened and because it was similar to frustrations I was having, I’ve already interspersed (in bold) the way I interpreted the various snags in the process. Can you help both of us figure out the best way to invite students to join a course to minimize these headaches?

I used the invite function in Open Lab, the students got the email (some had to dig it out of junk mail <b>yes, annoyance #1. One solution would be to have them register directly on the main openlab site</b> so they’re not waiting for the invitation, but that then requires them to create an account and then find your course and ask to join…<b>then you’ll need to approve them joining the course unless you change the settings temporarily so anyone can join</b>, and the students created log-in credentials. But when they tried to log-in all but two students got a message that the log-in had failed <b>(I’m pretty sure that creating an account triggers an authorization e-mail to their e-mail account and that they can’t log in until they’ve clicked on the link in that e-mail. If they didn’t get the e-mail because it went to junk, then they’d be getting an error</b>), that the maximum number of failures had been reached, and that they had to wait 20 minutes to try again. The students all said they had only tried to log-in once <b>(</b><b>this I haven’t yet heard. I’m going to post about this in the OpenLab forum to see if they have suggestions)</b><b>.</b> After the 20 minutes expired they all tried again and got in successfully (using the same credentials that were rejected the first time!).<b> (interesting. I can’t imagine they’d all found the e-mail by that time…but maybe?)</b>

[Bree]

Hi Mary,

Thanks for reaching out, and sorry you’re experiencing some frustration with student account creation. I do have a few suggestions that might help.

Regarding the spam folder issue, it would be best to reach out to your institution’s IT department to see if there are ways they can address this on the student email server end. And if they’re also hosting your CBOX OpenLab site, there might also be configurations they can make on the WordPress end to help.

In the meantime, you’ll want to instruct students to check their spam folders. You could also ask students to try adding the messages’ sender address to their email contacts (e.g. it might be something like “wordpress@yourdomain.edu”). I’m not entirely sure how well this would work, but it might help.

On the City Tech OpenLab, we usually don’t have faculty invite students to their course, but instead ask students to create accounts and then join the course. As mentioned in your email, we often suggest that if faculty are going to make their course private, they at least leave it open for a week or two while students are joining and then change the settings to private, to avoid having to accept the membership requests.

And you’re correct that there are two steps to the account creation process: first students fill out the registration page. Then, they get a confirmation email with a link they need to click in order for their account to be created.

I’m not sure why students would get errors trying to log in, unless they hadn’t clicked on the link in the email. If it is an error on the CBOX OpenLab end, it would be helpful to understand more about exactly what’s happening – did students definitely click on the verification email link but still weren’t able to log in? And, screenshots would also be helpful, if that’s possible. Or at least it would be good to know exactly what steps they took after clicking on the link in the email. e.g., where did they try logging in? Was it the ‘Log in’ box on the homepage, or the ‘Log in’ dropdown on the right side of the toolbar at the top of the site? What was the exact text of the error message? Etc…

I hope some of this is helpful! And please let us know if you find out any more details about the error students experienced when trying to log in.

Thanks!

Bree

[Ed Beck]

I’d echo what Bree said.

We whitelisted our IP address to make it easier.

If that isn’t an option, sometimes an SMTP mailer plugin can help, especially if you can get a dedicated email address like do-not-reply-commons@oneonta.edu

[Author]

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