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Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Debbie Yuster -
Number of replies: 10
Hello,

I am managing several sections of a course in one WeBWorK course. Each section has its own instructor. Rather than having all instructors receive all student emails, is there a way to direct emails from students in Section 1 to Instructor 1, emails from students in Section 2 to Instructor 2, etc?

It doesn't look like this can be done in WeBWorK...might have to send all the emails to a certain account and somehow filter and redirect them to the appropriate instructor.

Any better ideas?

Thanks,
Debbie
In reply to Debbie Yuster

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Hal Sadofsky -

This is a good question. To my knowledge the answer is no.

Our initial solution was to have a separate course for each
discussion section.

That was cumbersome since we have 4 discussion sections per
discussion leader. So now we have a separate course for
each discussion leader.

This is still awkward because homework is assigned for the class
as a whole, but it seems like the right level of compromise for
our setup.

-Hal
In reply to Hal Sadofsky

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Gavin LaRose -
Hi Debbie & Hal,

I think this is explicitly possible by setting the $feedback_by_section variable in global.conf (or, for an individual course, in the course.conf file). Setting that to a true value should result in only the instructors with the same section number as the student submitting the feedback request receiving the feedback e-mail.

Gavin
In reply to Gavin LaRose

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Hal Sadofsky -

Thanks Gavin - I didn't realize that.

We'll try it.
In reply to Hal Sadofsky

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Michael Schroeder -
Debbie,

We have one course with 24 sections, and we found a way to distribute the emails. We put the following flag in the course.conf file:

$feedback_by_section = 1;
Then if a student submits an email, it will go to all those TA or higher with the student's section in their section name. For example, if I have my section as "001,002,003" and a student from section "002" sends an email, I will receive it, but I will not from a student in section "004".

If you have someone wanting to receive all emails, setting their section to ".*" did the trick for us.

Hope this helps!

Mike Schroeder
In reply to Michael Schroeder

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Debbie Yuster -
Thanks everyone! This is an easy way to do exactly what I wanted.

Best,
Debbie
In reply to Michael Schroeder

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Zach Teitler -

Does this still work in 2021-2022?

In reply to Zach Teitler

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Glenn Rice -

Yes, the $feedback_by_section setting still works with the latest versions of WeBWorK.

In reply to Glenn Rice

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Zach Teitler -

Thanks. I meant, does a comma-separated list of sections (or other Perl string patterns such as .*) work for an instructor of multiple sections. Initial testing suggests it doesn’t; if that’s correct then an instructor of multiple sections should be given additional “dummy” accounts, one for each additional section.

In reply to Zach Teitler

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Glenn Rice -

No, that does not work.  Looking at the git history, I see that it never did that, contrary to the claims in the previous post.  If that did work for the person that made that post, then the server that he was working on had local modifications to make it so.  The current code (which is unchanged from the first time that the $feedback_by_section setting was initially added) just compares the sections of the sender and receiver for equality.  It does not use Perl regular expressions.

In reply to Glenn Rice

Re: Can "Email instructor" be directed to different emails depending on the student's section?

by Zach Teitler -

Thanks for the reply. It would have been nifty to have fancy matching, but I'm not going to worry about it. It's so easy to just create "dummy" users to catch emails, and that will work fine.