How to setup assignment submission notifications for tutors

[stedmana]

Seeing as Microsoft Teams does not have any sort of notifications for tutors when students submit assignments you will have to make your own one using a flow.

You will have to set a notifier for when a file is added to the submitted file -> student work folder for your share point site. Of course when a student submits work their file is added to the folder which will trigger the notification.

Once you have selected the folder and then 'create a new flow' you will need to select 'When a file is added in SharePoint, complete a custom action'

The custom action can be set to use the flow bot to message the right tutor within teams when one of their students has submitted work, you will see this when setting up the flow.

UPDATE: Be sure to read the comment section as the method below is not the best, refinements can be made

Flow example setup details below

 

The method is a little bloated at best but it will notify the tutor as to which student made the submission and in what class along with time and a few other details, it's basically the best that can be done that I can work out at least. 

Below is the notification the tutor will receive once a student has made a submission

The only way I could get the student name to print was to tag the directory as well, its not easy to make out at first but you get used to where the name will show up. It beats making a separate flow for every individual student.

If you have multiple classes you will have to create and name a flow for each class, I had to make about 30 of them

(You can re 'save as' a flow once its made as another name and just edit it slightly for another share point site without having to recreate from scratch)

It does have a few quirks sometimes one being that if the student undoes their hand in it will adjust the directory again and notify the tutor. You can adjust the notification to show more information to identify this, (Funnily enough you can get it to show the students name clearly on a undo hand-in, but not on a hand-in submission only with the directory link)

Thanks to @Kerry Enns for coming across this in 2018, I found a way to improve it slightly and though't Id make an official post about it, especially seeing as it doesn't look like there will be a proper notification anytime soon.

[#2]

Thank you so much for this, @stedmana, can't believe that you've received no likes for this! Probably because it is not not in the Microsoft Teams for Education channel.

[#3]

@stedmana Your post was very useful and the only walk-through I have found for getting notifications when Assignments are submitted in teams. 

However, when a scheduled assignment was posted, I was notified for each student because their files had been modified. It shows as modified by 'SharePoint App'.

I want to use Trigger settings to write an expression for a condition but I don't know what to call the objects and how to parse it. How do I refer to SharePoint App as the user who modified it. I put a tag in the Action body to display modified by's email address, but it seems to return 1 for that when SharePoint App triggers it.

So I am trying something like this @not(equals(triggerBody()?['Modified']?['email'], '1')) in the Trigger Conditions box but I really haven't found any discussions of expression and triggers trying to achieve the exclusion of SharePoint App.

Perhaps something in your original Action tags avoids this? I skipped checkoutuser and I couldn't find authordisplay in Power Automate.

[#4]

@stedmana 

You can download a ready-made template here:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Student-Assignment-Hand-In-Notification-...

[#5]

@mbalax @stedmana 

Thank you very much for sharing. 

I don't see anything in that script or png image to prevent this triggering due to the Sharepoint App modifying files when an assignment is set. How do you work around that? 

I have found a solution using the If condition and the claims identifier for Sharepoint App, leading to the Terminate action when Sharepoint App creates files.  If 'created by claims' equals i:0i.t|00000003-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000|app@sharepoint, Terminate.

I wrote instructions here. They'll be more useful to the casual enquirer than the .json export of it. 

https://scismith.wordpress.com/2020/05/01/how-to-set-up-alerts-when-assignments-are-submitted-on-tea... 

The remaining issue, which I have just understood better by looking at the Logic Apps template .json exported form, is that Terminate leads to status: "Failed" and I have been getting emails to say how many times a week it has 'failed', which are actually just times I have set assignments, immediate or scheduled. I haven't missed any flows for student uploads though!

I need to find a way to prevent the Flow without it classing as 'failed', because I have heard that the software tries to remove or turn off failing flows. Hope that's just a rumour!

[#6]

@RuthSmith  if the trigger is modification of: Student Work / Submitted work it runs fine - when you set an assignment these files don't change.

I have a great setup on my Class Team where new work appears with a thumbnail and a link in a private channel, with a flowbot notification in Activity.

You can give pretty near instant feedback!