Dawn Lorenz, an instructor for CE@UP’s RHS 301 course, made me aware that if an instructor sends an email from the clickable option from the grading feature on a drop box, the resulting course mail is flagged as a low priority message.
I asked the Outreach Helpdesk about the issue and they said they will keep their eye on the situation after the next ANGEL update on Jan 23rd, 2010. However, this is actually part of a related but bigger bug. Those course mails cannot be replied to successfully. If a student receives a course mail generated from the drop box feature and he or she wants to reply to that email, perhaps they disagree with the grade or have a question about it, the mail is lost in the ether. Apparently the bug doesn’t correctly add the proper “reply to” address and the message is never received by the instructor. This has of course led to some problems.
As of now, I have asked the Helpdesk to hold tight on passing the “low priority” query to the ANGEL Ops team until they fix the bigger bug. The Helpdesk will do their own testing on the “low priority” query after the upgrade later this month.
Information on the upcoming update to ANGEL:
http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/node/426
“If an instructor checked the box to send a mail message to a student when grading a drop box, replies to that mail message were not delivered to the instructor.”