Currently, ILC Session reminder emails don’t have a function to apply the time zone to the email. Our courses are set to time zones across Canada and our students are finding the emails confusing since they only include the time and not the time zone. The students assume the time is their local time and they often miss the session.
It would make much more sense for the reminder emails to have an added time zone function. This would not be a lot of work for a developer to add since the time zone function already exists in the ILC Session Creation, it would take very little effort to apply that function to the ILC Session reminder emails as well.
Chris Mckinnon, from the Absorb Client Advocacy team, advised us to post this idea when he could not find a work around solution to resolve the time zone issue in our help ticket.
This is also a problem for us. We are scheduling all ILC sessions in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) so that the sessions are displayed in Absorb in the user's time zone. It would be nice if we could schedule in our time zone (rather than having to convert to UTC first) and rely on Absorb to handle time zone differences for users automatically.
We have started scheduling all ILC sessions in universal time to make sure
they display correctly. We name the ILC with the time based on the client's
time zone.
We do use most of the enhanced emails - when someone signs up for our
curriculum, they get a bunch of enrollment emails. They also get a reminder
email 7 days ahead of time. While the calendar invite applies to their
calendar correctly, the client audience doesn't tend to look at their
calendars (they live in email).
We tried the disclaimer which Frances uses (an excellent workaround) - our
clients were not pleased.
We have similar issue as well. Most of our leaners are from all over USA, and its very confusing for them with out having time zone displayed. Right now we are manually typing the Time Zone on every reminder email. Implementation of this idea will be very helpful.
Is there any estimated time on when this will be implemented.
Hi Demetrio - Thank you for reviewing this. Yes, we do use the calendar. However, even with the enhanced calendar invites, the time zone issue still occurs within the session reminder emails. This method relies on the student logging into their Edge account and looking directly at the calendar to remind themselves of the time of their session (in their own local time). Often students just read the email and assume the time quoted in the message is in their local time, which of course, it is not. Also the students often prefer to use their own calendars (google/outlook/microsoft teams etc.) and when they receive the session reminder email it confuses them.
@Demetrio Pagano we do use the session enrollment emails but have had a people one email systems that do not support the file/auto placement of the invite so they are relying solely on the written information. We're also looking to use the Google calendar system option too to enhance the Learner experience.
Thank you for your ideas. I do see that our "Session Time" automatic field (aka dynamic field) in the Session Enrollment & Session Reminder message templates do not currently include timezones, so I am adding the Admin Experience category to this idea so that we can review this holistically between both product offerings. Do you currently use the enhanced calendar invites so that session enrollment emails get automatically placed in the learner's calendar based on their timezone?
We started to put a disclaimer in our emails to help with confusion. I'd love for the time zone to be a 'auto fill field'
**Note event times listed in emails are default Eastern Time (ET) zone, if not otherwise noted. Your calendar invite should adjust for your local time zone.