Fix the Canvas Course Invitation Email (New Students)

[patdura]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-10-07).

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The email sent by Canvas to brand new users who need to register includes three problematic links – see marked up screen shot.

If the user clicks on one of those three links (commonly the first one in the email) it leads them to a log in page – which, of course, they cannot use.  That in turn leads the user to think they need to try to recover their password (which won’t work since they are still in a pending state and don’t have a Canvas password yet).  And that leads to support tickets being raised.

We believe that these links should all be REMOVED from this template as they serve no purpose and lead to more work for the Canvas support team and your customers support teams when students are confused and frustrated (which also creates a BAD FIRST IMPRESSION of Canvas and our own brand).

The ONLY button/link that will get them learning is the “Get Started” button – which should have singular focus in this message.

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For context, there is a separate and distinct email template send to EXISTING Canvas users, which is not the problem.  See screen shot below.  The links at the bottom are distracting, but they are at least actionable for a user who has an account available on Canvas.

[Stef_retired]

 @patdura  Welcome to the Canvas Community!

Have you contacted the Canvas admin for your school or district about this, and if so, has the admin discussed the issue with your organization's Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Implementation Consultant (IC)? Please let us know.

Thanks.

[patdura]

Hi Stephanie.

We have discussed with our CSM and she suggested that we post a feature request here to see if other customers would benefit from this change.

Best,
Pat

[Stef_retired]

@patdura 

Thank you for confirming that, Pat. We'll open this for broader discussion to gauge general interest.

[melanie]

These changes would be extremely helpful.

We start classes weekly for students and this has been a huge issue for us as well.  Very time-consuming. 

[Stef_retired]

Thanks to everyone who has participated in this conversation. Please have a look at what's coming in the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-10-07) .

[patdura]

Fantastic news!  Thank you for the update!

[Stef_retired]

Comments from Instructure

In course registration emails, the email footer does not include the course URL or the Notification Preferences link. These links display in emails after a user has completed the registration process. Additionally, for new user registration emails, the email does not include a link to the institution’s Canvas URL.

For more information, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-10-07).

[berninghausen]

Anyway to be able to customize the way information is sent to end-users is a good thing. Making the welcome or invite email align with how things work for your entity will help a lot of questions and issues. One example that comes to mind is changing the 'Get Started' button to 'Login with XXX' so the user knows that where they can go and what it will do.