{"id":3207,"date":"2016-01-04T22:42:36","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T06:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=3207"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:23:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:23:12","slug":"weird-ass-workaround","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2016\/01\/weird-ass-workaround\/","title":{"rendered":"Weird-Ass Workaround"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moodle has always done something horribly wrong – each student’s information is not attached to the class they are in.<\/p>\n

I teach at least five<\/em> different classes in Moodle each semester.<\/p>\n

So let’s say a student sends me a Message. I cannot tell which of the five of my classes they’re in. I don’t know which class to open to answer their question. And a few versions ago, Moodle made this worse in their programming by having student profiles be completely separate from the class anyway.<\/p>\n

And yes, I’ve asked them to please put their course and section number in the e-mail. That’s running about 50% despite reminders. And it’s so 1998.<\/p>\n

\"contactlisa\"For several years, I’ve used my own cgi form, embedded in an HTML block on the main page. I used the form to automatically put in which course they were sending the form from. Thanks to the vagaries of browsers, I’ve had recent complaints that it sometimes doesn’t work.<\/p>\n

I tried Quickmail, a plug-in for Moodle, but it doesn’t let me know which class the email is coming from, since its address for the student is the one in the main system.<\/p>\n

How about Gmail? Here’s where the weird-ass workaround is.<\/p>\n

I figure I should use Gmail to somehow create Groups from the rosters in the enrollment system. But Gmail doesn’t want you to do that – it wants you to add the names to a Group one at a time<\/em>. Minimum 200 emails per semester. As if.<\/p>\n

However, I can use the “Old Contacts” (rather hard to get to at https:\/\/www.google.com\/contacts\/u\/0\/?cplus=1#contacts<\/a>) to add a list I’ve made in Excel as a CSV file, using the info from the enrollment system. So I can get them in a Group using Import.<\/p>\n

But then, it doesn’t show me in the in-box which group they’re in. Or in their contact info inside the email.<\/p>\n

However, if I turn on the setting to “Show the People Widget”, it will show me some info. Not the Group they’re in. But it shows the Circle<\/em> they’re in. So long as they’re only in one Circle, that is.<\/p>\n

\"peoplewidget\"<\/p>\n

So I’ve created a Circle for each class with the name and section number.<\/p>\n

\"circle\"<\/p>\n

You can’t add a bunch of emails to a Circle – they’d all have to be individually selected from my Contacts. I can go down the list in Old Contacts and add them – one at a time. Might have to.<\/p>\n

But at least now when a student emails me, I can look them up once and add them to a Circle. Then when they contact me again, I can see which class they’re in.<\/p>\n

That’s something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moodle has always done something horribly wrong – each student’s information is not attached to the class they are in. I teach at least five different classes in Moodle each semester. So let’s say a student sends me a Message. I cannot tell which of the five of my classes they’re in. I don’t know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cmslms","category-online-teaching"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9880,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207\/revisions\/9880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}