EduLink One - Do your parents use EduLink One?

[David44]

We have had staff using EduLink One for a while and are now looking in to having students and parents sign in to it too.

 

Do you already do this? Assuming you use the manual accounts system for parents rather than create AD accounts for example, how does this work?

 

EduLink One seems to imply that every current and future parent will need to be sent an invitation email which contains their username (which EduLink One generates) and a link to (re)set their password. Is that right?

 

What happens if we send an invite email and the parent doesn't receive it? Can they still sign in by going to EduLink One, typing in the school code and then clicking on 'Reset Login' and entering their email address? Does the email that EduLink One sends them contain enough information for them to be able to sign in, presumably their username and a link to change their password?

 

What about when a new student starts, can we simply send them a generic message telling them to go to www.edulinkone.com, enter the school code and click on 'Reset Login' or do we have to go through some kind of account create process before they can sign in? I.e. do parent accounts get created automatically?

 

We've used two parent systems in recent years.

Firefly where parents would simply go to the website, type their email address in, receive an email with a link that enabled them to create an account. Nice and easy, no extra work for the school.

SIMS Parent which requires someone in school to find every parent on a website with incredibly poor UX and send them an invite. Bloody nightmare, loads of extra work for the school.

 

I'm worried that EduLink One is beginning to sound closer to SIMS Parent than Firefly when it comes to the onboarding of parents.

[rob_coles]

Our Staff/Students use AD credentials, parents use accounts generated in the backend of Edulink. I normally filter the accounts in the backend to parents with email addresses that have never logged in. You can click the mail icon that will send them all logins. You can customise the welcome email, We've added bits in asking to use the update information feature for example.

 

Most of our parents are fairly onboard with us. We get maybe a dozen or so password resets when it comes to parents evenings.

 

Students are instructed how to login as part of the first ICT lesson, for the most part once you've sent them the details thats about it.

 

Rob

[forkies]

Logins for parents, we insist on unique email address for parents (so mum and dad can’t have the same email address).

Then they can use the reset password option on the login page to request a password, username they can just enter their email address.

Simple and easy, we had a few queries but majority of our parents managed to do it without issue. All new students parents get a welcome letter which includes the instructions for the above too.

Basically zero admin as you already have to put their details in Sims so not adding work.

[jthompson]

EduLink will integrate with all the major MISs, so that all your staff, students and parents will get EduLink accounts provisioned automatically.

 

For parents, the email address you have for them in your MIS will be associated with their account, so they can use that for self-service password recovery.

 

You can see a list of all the EduLink accounts in the EduLink Admin pages. Go to the Login tab, scroll to the bottom and click on 'Load all user accounts'. The filtering options on that list are nice and powerful, so you can filter it to, for instance, all parents of pupils in Year 9 with a last login timestamp of 'never'. With the list filtered, you can then do bulk operation to send out the onboarding email to all of those users. The template for that email is configurable on that page too. By default, it'll include their username and a password reset link, which I think is valid for 25 days or something.

 

The invitation email you can send out from the admin pages is the same template as the email they'll get from doing a self-service.

 

Whilst account provisioning is automatic, the sending of onboarding/reset emails isn't. You'll need to pull the trigger on those, or alternatively just instruct parents to do the self-service thing to get onto their accounts.

 

Parents without an email address will still get EduLink accounts provisioned automatically, but without an associated email address, self-service or admin-initiated invitation emails won't be available. In the list of accounts, however, you'll see that they will have a randomly-generated password listed. You'll be able to download the lists of users, including any such passwords, as a CSV, so that you can do whatever old-fashioned mail-merging might be needed.

 

In short, accounts are created automatically and after setting your filters on the list of parent accounts, it's a single click to onboard them.

Edited November 19, 2021 by jthompson

[jthompson]

Also worth pointing out that you'll need to configure a mail relay for EduLink to use. They'll be able to recommend some providers for that (e.g. ClickSend) or you can bring your own. 365 or Gmail tenancies can be used, but familiarise yourself with the usage quotas for those, as too many bulk mailouts to parents might start triggering temporary restrictions.

[NotSoFast]

We set it up in September. Their support team were great and checked it before we sent the invite. We did have a problem where the new email address we used to send invites, notifications etc got identified by Google as potential spam, but that resolved itself over a week or so. I'd probably suggest sending a few invites at a time to let Google (we use Gmail) realise it's genuine. Our parents love it now. Nothing but positive feedback.