Email-invite onboarding doesn't preserve the invited email in roster.csv

[mheckner]

Context: I have students' names and university email addresses, but no
control over their GitHub usernames (most don't have a GitHub account yet), since this is a CS50-style type of course, where students usually have no previous CS experience. This might lead to a scenario, where I can not grade students, because I only have phantasy GitHub accounts.

Per the Known Limitations page, this scenario has two documented paths:
"collect usernames up front (a signup form works well)" or "the
email-invitation path, where each student completes a short onboarding step
that links their account."

What I tried doing: Upload a .txt file with one E-Mail address per line, nothing else,
lets say: octocat@octocat.com (assume GitHub account already existing for this E-Mail).

When I check the inbox for octocat@octocat.com, I see an E-Mail from GitHub there:
"@mheckner has invited you to join the @OTH-Tech-Skills-Classroom50 organization", and
a button, where I can join the org. But there is no onboarding process, where students can enter any data.

Once I do that, octocat (and only octocat, no E-Mail) is added to roster.csv

But: This does not help me as a professor, since I have no way of mapping octocat to a real
student name and or an University E-Mail address. Since the course has over 100 students, entering
any manual data is not feasible.

Creating a sign-up form on my end seems a little cumbersome and error prone. Although in my impression, mapping GitHub usernames to real /offcial student data, seems like a critical requirement for university grading, which should not be pushed out of classroom50.

Or maybe I am not getting how this is supposed to work!

Any input highly appreciated! Thanks for the great work, everything else, including autograding works flawlessly so far! I really appreciate it!

[rongxin-liu]

Unfortunately, I don’t think we can support email invites the way you intended, as much as we’d like to preserve the email addresses.

The hard blocker with email invites is that once students accept the invites, our app has no way of determining which email address maps to which student username. That’s why we don’t preserve the email addresses after importing.

If we were to preserve the email addresses, what we could offer is the ability for you to manually link each username to an email address. However, this would still be infeasible for a class with 100+ students.

[rongxin-liu]

In an earlier iteration of the app, we did offer an onboarding flow that allowed students to self-report their email addresses. However, that process was also error-prone, as students could still enter the wrong email address, and it created more friction and confusion for teachers. So we ultimately removed that onboarding flow entirely.

[mheckner]

ok, thanks for the fast reply! Then, I will need to gather GitHub usernames in our LMS and export them together with the names and student email-addresses from there.

[mheckner]

But I would really appreciate it, if there would be a solution to that problem, I think I am not alone with that problem: #456

[rongxin-liu]

As of version 1.31.0, email invitations will persist the invited email address in roster.csv, provided that the invitations are sent through classroom50.org. Each email invitation will create a special GitHub Team with the invite- prefix. These teams should not be deleted or modified.

After students join the org using the email invitation, they will be added to their corresponding email invite team.

When teachers open the roster view, Classroom 50 will go through all invite teams, extract the GitHub usernames, and update roster.csv accordingly. The invite teams will then be deleted.