Students have option to make Non-University email their Default - Not an issue? LTI's ok?

[StephenPerez]

We have just moved to Canvas and realized students are able to change the default email for Canvas.  Our experience with changing emails in Blackboard is this would cause a disconnect with certain LTI's. 

Preferably, we would like all users to keep our university-assigned email, but that is not an option in Canvas unless we upload a new CSS.  Is Canvas more forgiving when it comes to email address changes?  What else would this effect?

Ex. Freshman year, John Doe clicks LTI links w/ the university email assigned.  Sophomore year, he changes it to a Gmail, and makes it the default.  Is his existing info from the LTI's still connected to his account?

[DecoyLex · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends."

While Canvas does send a stable, unique ID for each user (in addition to your SIS User IDs which should also be stable), some tools rely on the lis_person_contact_email_primary attribute in the LTI launch never changing. This attribute is always the email the user has set as the default email, *not* the email your school has assigned the user. If the tool supports it, you can send email addresses in the custom fields with the value set to $vnd.Canvas.Person.email.sis (see LTI Variable Substitutions). This variable returns the email for the user set by your SIS.

[DecoyLex · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends."

While Canvas does send a stable, unique ID for each user (in addition to your SIS User IDs which should also be stable), some tools rely on the lis_person_contact_email_primary attribute in the LTI launch never changing. This attribute is always the email the user has set as the default email, *not* the email your school has assigned the user. If the tool supports it, you can send email addresses in the custom fields with the value set to $vnd.Canvas.Person.email.sis (see LTI Variable Substitutions). This variable returns the email for the user set by your SIS.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

I concur with @DecoyLex on the "it depends" answer.  We ended up putting javascript in place to prevent users from changing their default email.  They can add new email addresses for notifications and everything, just not change the default.  While this is not ideal, it does ensure that LTIs work more consistently as there are many that do just look at the default email attribute.

-Chris