Email templates: show instructor names as First Last (or separate first & last names entirely) rather than Last,First
Starting in Ares 5.0, item-type email templates no longer draw from the User tags, and we must use either Course.Instructor or Course.InstructorDisplayName to insert an instructor's name in the email template. However, the default display for these fields is Last, First, so our emails now read "Dear Smith, Susan," rather than "Dear Prof. Smith" or "Dear Susan Smith" or "Dear Susan." Both Course.Instructor and Course.InstructorDisplayName show the same thing; if we change the display name in the course, both fields change. We'd like to be able to pull the instructor's name(s) into Item-type email templates as First Last (or separate first & last names entirely in different tags, although that seems more complex). One possible solution: Perhaps there could be a setting in the customization manager that allows us to choose to have the default course instructor display name show up as either Last, First OR First Last. (We'd be happy to have the instructor name display as First Last in our webpages as well.)
Jenny Vitti
shared this idea
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Theresa Spangler
commented
We are also running into this issue. My left eye starts to twitch a bit when I see the email greet our user with Dear Last Name, First Name. I don't know if our users will even notice it, but it's not my preference. We send the majority of our emails from the item record. Not being able to pull data from the users table is an unhelpful byproduct of the multiple instructors feature, which I (so far) have not seen as a true benefit for us. I do like being able to see instructor's last name first when doing a custom course or item search so am not sure what the answer might be, other than allowing us to somehow pull data from the user table again.