[ARCHIVED] My Students are not receiving email from canvas or instructure.

[tmoynihan1]

My Students are not receiving email from canvas or instructure.

My IT department made sure instructure.com what whitelisted for all students 9-12

I can receive email on my teacher email

But my students do not receive email when I try to invite them to the course or at any other times.

Is there some issue I do not know about?

We use gmail but our addresses are our own domain.

Thanks

Tim Moynihan

[dwillmore · Accepted solution]

I should have gathered that from your initial post.   Thanks.

[tmoynihan1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Stuart,

I use the free for teacher account. (I hope to be a paid user someday but I have to convince my administration that it works well first.)

I did get a sample student account and I can not get my sample student email to receive outside mail so I think it is a problem on our side. 

I am going to try to get my IT folks to trouble shoot that part first and then return to seeing if I can get students to receive email from instructure after that. 

Thanks,

Tim

[dwillmore]

Do you know if your students have their notification settings set properly?

[tmoynihan1]

The Problem is even before they can set any settings.

They are not even receiving the invitation to join my class.

-Tim

[dwillmore · Accepted solution]

I should have gathered that from your initial post.   Thanks.

[stuart_ryan]

Hi  @tmoynihan1 ,

Do you know if your OSSU uses a self-hosted version of Canvas or the Canvas product hosted by Instructure (cloud version)?

I tried to hunt around a little for a link to confirm and I was unable to locate one. I am assuming it is the cloud version as you mentioned instructure.com (so will employ that assumption through the remainder of my notes).

Can I please ask how the students are being created would that be via an automated integration with PowerSchool? If so there may be a problem with how their notifications are set up (I only mention this as I had a similar problem with Canvas in the past and it turned out there was a single flag that we missed setting).

I would recommend the following steps:

1. First jump on with Canvas Support via the help menu, provide them an example student that didn't receive the email and they should be able to check the student's account and make sure it has been set up correctly (and has the right default notifications set up for them to receive the account creation and invitation emails).
2. Check in with your IT department on how the accounts are created, and whether this appears to be an issue for anyone else. It might also be good for them to liaise with Instructure to ascertain where the emails are getting blocked.

I hope that helps, please let us know how you go!

Stuart

[tmoynihan1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Stuart,

I use the free for teacher account. (I hope to be a paid user someday but I have to convince my administration that it works well first.)

I did get a sample student account and I can not get my sample student email to receive outside mail so I think it is a problem on our side. 

I am going to try to get my IT folks to trouble shoot that part first and then return to seeing if I can get students to receive email from instructure after that. 

Thanks,

Tim

[stuart_ryan]

Hi Tim,

Definitely sounds like there is something deeper that is the issue. Please let us know how you get on and if you have any additional queries related to this.

Best of luck getting it sorted with your tech support (and hope you can convince your administration  )

Stuart

[schneief]

I would also like to confirm I am having the same issue. I invited two fake students via email, one using a yahoo mail and the other using a gmail account. Neither received the e-mail. I re-sent the invites under "people".

[tmoynihan1 · Accepted solution]

I have found a work around.  I do not think this is the best solution but it seems to be the working solution.  I have created accounts using "usernames" instead of emails, then I give the username to a student and have them assign their email in settings. One asspect of this solution is that the students must user their username to sign in, not their email address or the "sign in with google" option. 

[schneief]

Thanks for the tip! It turns out that since this is my return to Canvas after a five year gap, I was making a user error.  Canvas doesn't send the invitations until the course is published. However there are a couple reasons you could miss this I'd suggest to them. I noticed many people have posted this question and I also noticed they are often people who are using Canvas independent from a University. The reason that's significant is independent users have to populate their own roster and I'd bet many of them are making the same mistake.

Below is the "Publish/ UnPublished" button. To me it looks like "Published" is selected because it is checked. However the red "Unpublished" rectangle is not a button even though the edges have skeumorphic shading to make it look raised like a button.  You press the "Publish" rectangle to publish the course. I was misinterpreting the check to mean that was selected. I'd put it "Course Status: Unpublished".

I'd also suggest more clear feedback when you resend invitations before the course is published. Maybe give people the option to send invitations beforehand anyway so Students can set up accounts, just about every professor I know is still tweaking course content right before the semester, but they have their rosters before that.  Just suggestions though, I really appreciate being back on Canvas.