How to use multiple Google accounts with Google Classroom without G Suite being the default account?

Question

I'm using Google Classrooms to support my course at a university through G Suite. Many of my students already have a Google account that is different from the G Suite account. So they are dealing with multiple Google accounts.

Unfortunately, Google Classroom (when it sends out notifications) assumes that students only have one Google account, or that the "default" account is the G Suite account. For example, in an email notification for a student's comment (or a professor's creation of an assignment, etc.), the "Reply" button/link is something like https://classroom.google.com/c/asdfasdfasdfafd/sa/asdfasdfffasdfasd/details

If the G Suite account is not the first, then this link won't work.

The solution suggested in the Google Forums seems to say you need to log out of all Google accounts except the G Suite one, or make it so your G Suite is your default account (the first one you log in to). That answer has twice as many downvotes as upvotes. One reason is that it recommends using Chrome user profiles to separate accounts, which means you have to re-install all your chrome plugins, and password memory is not shared across those profiles either (it's really not a great idea). Also, as for logging in to my G Suite domain as the default, I have a legacy Gmail account since 2006 where I send and receive all emails. I can't transfer all the history of emails to my G Suite (that feature is not supported), so it's not a feasible/acceptable solution. I imagine my students have similar concerns.

Is there a more acceptable workaround? I'm trying to maximize the acceptance of G Suite in my course.

Answer 1

The following workaround assumes that the G Suite account is the second one on your list of Google Accounts. You can see the order of this list by going to Gmail and clicking on the Google icon in the upper-right corner. The first account will have the word Default to the right. In fact, this counts as the zeroth account (the first in computer languages that use 0 as a first index). So, the second account on the list would have the number 1 in the scheme of Google's URLs.

So the workaround is to copy the URL of the "Reply" link in the notification, and paste it in the browser, but before pressing enter, modify it as follows:

Assuming the URL is https://classroom.google.com/c/asdfasdfasdfafd/sa/asdfasdfffasdfasd/details, simply insert u/1/ before the /c/ part, giving:

https://classroom.google.com/u/1/c/asdfasdfasdfafd/sa/asdfasdfffasdfasd/details

Note that the 1 comes from the place in the list of Google accounts after Default as shown when you click in Gmail as described above. If you have more than two accounts, the G Suite account used for classrooms might be 2 or 3 or another depending on that order, and you should use that number instead in the URL.