How to enable notifications to instructors for questions posted in a course?

We have the Q&A widget for eLearning courses so that someone can ask a question linked to a specific learning element within the course.  I am also trying to figure out the notification that sends an email to the course expert (even though I can’t assign an expert to an eLearning course?).  I feel like I am missing something as well, or the type of notification doesnt exist?

I have a few clients that use the Comments widget and for that one, the notification is “New Comment” under the Forums section of notification triggers. HOWEVER, there is a caveat for that notification. An instructor (assuming you make the target of notification the instructor) will only get it if they post a comment to the widget which in essence “subscribes” them to the widget for that course and the New Comment notification. I generally have the instructor post something like “Please leave your comments/questions here” to get them subscribed to the notifications for future comments for that course.

My understanding of the “New Question to Expert” notification is that only triggers for questions asked in the Q&A area of Coach & Share and does not trigger for questions asked within the Q&A widget of a course. I personally am not a fan of the Q&A widget in the course because it forces a user to associate their question to a training material and 1, I don’t think it’s super intuitive that they have to do that and 2, their question may not be about a particular material. 

For those 2 reasons and that there isn’t a notification I’m aware of for this, I push people towards the comments widget instead with the caveat above on how to get the notifications. Hope that helps!

I use a Notification that alerts me when new comments in the Comments widget (under the Forums> New Comment) so that if I miss it somewhere else, I will get an email. This is better for people who don’t “live” on the LMS the way I do.

We use an FAQs channel and the bigger obstacle to ensuring that the questions are answered is training the experts to look at the channel, so having it on a home page dash board makes sense.

The work-around is described here. It requires Discover, Coach and Share and for the class to be associated with a channel. Using the notification “New content's question to expert,” the channel expert(s) will receive a notification when a new question is posted to the Q&A panel.