What is “Notifications”?

Notifications is a set of features designed to keep learners and instructors up-to-date on activity in edX courses they are enrolled in or manage. It’s built around three key components:

1. Notification triggers: The specific course events or activities that generate notifications.

2. Delivery channels: The different ways notifications are delivered to users, such as email, tray, or mobile push notifications.

3. Preferences center: An interface that allows users to choose which notifications they receive, through which channels and frequency.

Notification triggers

As of Feb, 2025, we have almost full coverage for activities in discussion forums, a notification for course update and two notifications for open response assessments. For list of activities, please refer to table presented later in this document.

Delivery channels

Our objective is to provide the following channels:

1. Tray: Went live on Nov 15th, 2023 along with preferences center.

2. Email: Went live on Sept 30th, 2024.

3. Mobile push: Under development by 2U Mobile team as of Feb, 2025. (Contact: @​Moiz Alam )

Channel: Tray

The notification tray keeps users informed while they’re on the web platform. A bell icon in the top-right corner displays the count of unread notifications. When clicked, it opens a tray that organizes notifications into tabs based on activity type.

Each notification includes the relevant course’s name, a red dot to indicate it’s unread (not clicked), and a timestamp showing when it was generated. A gear icon in the tray’s top-right corner links to the preferences center, where users can adjust their notification settings, while a feedback button allows users to report any issues.

Screenshot: Notifications tray

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Channel: Email

We send out email notification summaries, called email digests, to keep users updated on course activities even when they're away from the platform. These digests are delivered daily or weekly, based on user preferences. Each email includes up to five notifications per activity category—Discussions, Grading, and Updates—summarizing events from the past 24 hours for daily digests and the past 7 days for weekly digests.

Daily and weekly emails have one-click unsubscribe option which when used will turn off email notifications for all activity types.

For each platform area (Discussions, Grading, Updates) notification count in the email is limited to 5 and a “See X more…” link at the bottom indicates that there are more notifications. Clicking this will take user to the learner dashboard.

Screenshot: Notifications email a.k.a daily digest

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Channel: Mobile push

Connect with the edX mobile team to learn more. Contact: @​Moiz Alam

Preferences center

The preferences center provides users control over which notifications they receive, along with their preferred channel and cadence. It can accessed by navigating to “Notifications” on the “Accounts” page or by clicking the gear icon in the notification tray.

Screenshot: Notification preferences on Account settings page

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Screenshot: Gear icon in notifications tray

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Granularity: Preferences can be set at the account level or at the course level. A drop down can used to switch between account level and different courses.

For a user enrolled in multiple courses:

• If a preference is ON for at least 1 course, this preference will appear as ON at the account level, even though it may be OFF for all other courses.

• If email cadence for a particular preference is Daily for one course and different for the rest, then it shows up as Mixed at the account level.

Screenshot: Drop down for selecting course or account

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Within “Discussions,” the “Activity Notifications” preference controls notifications for seven specific activity types.

Roles: Preferences like “ORA new submission” and “Content Reported” are visible only to course staff/admins and to users with forum moderation privileges, respectively.

Grouping: Volume of notifications for New discussion posts can be quite high especially for courses with large enrollment count. Therefore, all unseen notifications for activity for a course, will be grouped into one notification in the tray and in the email, as seen in the screenshot below.

Screenshot: Grouped New discussion posts notification for a course

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Defaults: By default, notifications that are highly relevant are enabled for both tray and email channels. The email cadence for most activities is set to “Daily” by default, except for "Course Updates," which is disabled due to the high expected volume of emails.

Waffle flags

1. notifications.enable_notifications: Enables notification creation at the backend and displays notification tray in the header.

2. notifications.enable_email_notifications: Enables daily and weekly notification digests.

3. notifications.enable_notification_grouping: Enables grouping of notifications (grouping logic only exist for 1 notification at present i.e. new discussion posts).

Tracking events: pending