Notifications for Instructors
What OptiLearn notifies you about as an instructor and how to control it
OptiLearn keeps you informed about activity in your courses without you having to refresh dashboards. This page covers the notifications you receive as an instructor and the alerts your students see when you take action.
Notifications you receive
The Teaching category on your preferences page covers the notifications that target instructors:
| Notification | What triggers it |
|---|---|
| New submission received | A student submits an assignment in one of your courses |
| Ungraded submissions reminder | You have a backlog of submissions waiting for feedback |
| Course engagement alert | Activity in one of your courses has dropped significantly week-over-week |
| Weekly teaching summary | A weekly email with enrollments, submissions, and engagement numbers |
Plus the institution-wide alerts you'd expect — class scheduled, system announcements, and so on.
Notifications your students receive when you act
When you do certain things in OptiLearn, students get an automatic notification on their preferred channel. Knowing this helps you avoid surprising them and lets you batch-edit things quietly when you don't want to notify everyone.
| Your action | Notification students see |
|---|---|
| Publish a course | Optionally, a "new course available" alert to students whose interests match |
| Add a new lesson to a published course | "New lesson published" |
| Grade a submission | "Assignment graded" with their score |
| Return work for revision | "Resubmission requested" with your feedback |
| Add a comment to graded work | "Feedback on submission" |
| Schedule a live class | "Live class reminder" the day before and 15 min before |
| Cancel a live class | "Live class cancelled" |
| Upload a class recording | "Live class recording available" |
| Post a course announcement | "New announcement" routed to enrolled students |
Students choose how each of these reaches them — email, push, or in-app — on their own preferences page. You don't need to coordinate channels.
Managing your own preferences
Open Settings → Notifications in the sidebar. The page is the same one students use, but with the Teaching category visible. Toggle channels per row, set frequency to digest if a category is too noisy, and click Reset to defaults if you ever want to start over.
For the full preferences walkthrough — channels, digest times, reset behaviour — see Notification preferences.
Institution-wide notification settings
If you're an admin, the Notification preferences link in your admin sidebar opens a separate institution-level page where you can set defaults that apply to every new account. Individual users can still override those defaults on their own settings page.
Tips
- Lean on the weekly teaching summary. If you teach across many courses, the Monday digest is a calmer way to track engagement than per-event push notifications.
- Keep "new submission" on push while you're actively grading — you'll catch them as they land.
- Mute "engagement alert" if you have a small class. The signal is more useful at scale.