Invitation email sent out from 'Student' rather than 'Teacher'

[davefoord]

I have set up some pulses, with invitations, that was sending welcome emails out to new members of the course, and at first these emails were being sent 'from' the teacher on the course, and looked good - however today for some reason, the invitations were being sent out from other random students on the course, rather than the teacher - and I have no idea why. I cannot work out any logic as to what would cause this behaviour.

The 'from' address in the email was containing the name of the other students, as was the placeholders for 'Sender_Lastname' and 'Sender_firstname' (which did at least match the 'from' name).

[xmailer2022]

I can confirm this problem.

Which line would have to be edited in vars.php to fix the sender name, as a workaround? In my case, I generally only need a fixed sender name.

Thanks a lot for your help.

[davefoord]

Has anyone else had this problem? I am still getting the same issue, and wonder if anyone else is - and whether someone could fix this bug?

Thanks

[stefanscholz]

Hi @davefoord,

my apologies for not responding earlier to this issue.

Personally, I was never able to reproduce it on our servers so far, and the developers looked into the issue and could not find the reason for it either. It was reported by several customers separately though, so I'm unfortunately sure that the issue exists, but so far, we don't have a fix for it. Fixing something that is not re-producable on our side is always a tricky problem.

What we've been doing though in the past weeks is to start working on the next release of Pulse. This will be a significant release, which will change the architecture of Pulse. Here's the idea: We've built Pulse with flexibility in mind. Using the availability status as "trigger" allowed us to cover a lot of use cases and the deep integration into the learning path. While I personally think the flexibility is great, especially for more experienced learning designers and teachers, it is a bit complicated to use, and, as we see from the issues reported here, it sometimes has "glitches".

Here's our plan: for all the "generic" tasks (like a simple welcome message or telling a student that he/she has not completed an activity in time), we will come up with an easier, more intuitive and more robust solution. Pulse will remain a course activity, and we will try to keep as much flexibility as possible.

If you want to help, please share the use cases that you use Pulse for, and those that you would like to use it for.

That would help us a lot!

Thanks
Stefan

[davefoord]

Hi Stefan, sorry - I thought I had replied to this ages ago, but looks like I didn't.

In terms of use cases - the ability to reliably send a 'welcome to the course' email would be really good (if the above bug could be fixed).

Another use case would be where a tutor can sign off a group of students - at the moment, the pulse doesn't recognise groups the same was as other activities do, so I haven't been able to use this as all tutors ended up seeing all groups, even ones they are not in, and therefore shouldn't see.