Emails for unanswered questions

[niknetniko]

Issue to collect ideas and feedback about emails for questions. Other relevant issues with mail-related comments are #2265 and #1788.

• Choosing frequency: daily digests, immediately, weekly digest (others?)
  • Choose moment when using digests, e.g. every Friday around 10 am the weekly digest
• Enabling/disabling, probably on the user profile somewhere
  • Maybe with option per course, although I'm not sure this is very usefyul.
  • Maybe some notion of being online or in an exercise session, in which emails are not sent. This would probably be on the course level, not on the user level. This is probably only useful for the immediate frequency.

Undecided:

• Some timeframe in which to send mails, e.g. office hours.
  • This is only useful if using the "immediate" mail frequency.
  • Questions made during the "off time" will probably need to be bundled, to prevent having to send a lot of mails at 9 am when office hours start
• Emails to students (e.g. if a question is marked as answered). Since we don't really have "answers" yet, we can't send the answer in the mail itself. This would also require the notion of being online or in an exercise session, to prevent students from getting mails during the exercise session.

[rien]

I think a good first step would be a setting per course membership for teachers (or even students) to send a mail for every new question.

[rien]

@bmesuere which priority do we want to assign to this issue?

[bcoppens]

Maybe some quick thoughts / observations about this: for a course we have added a set of optional exercises on Dodona, where we enabled the questions-feature. I had assumed implicitly that I would have gotten mails when there would have been questions; had not the co-teacher told me that there were questions, I think I would never have realised that students had asked questions. Even now, because this is an optional set of exercises without a specific deadline, and we don't use Dodona as a daily driver, as a teacher, I'm probably going to forget to check Dodona regularly, making the 'questions' feature not as useful as it could be, at least for me.

The original comment lists different kinds of cool & potentially useful options, but which all probably would take quite some time and effort to design and implement. However, to a first approximation, just having the option 'send an email when a question is asked' would be more than enough: people who check Dodona daily anyways can leave it disabled; people who only use it for asynchronous optional exercises can enable it.