Classroom Owner Weirdness

[Shaun Creighton]

We have a script we use that takes our SIS data and creates Google Classrooms based on that data. For new Classrooms, the command is (preceded by the requisite CSV stuff):

gam create course alias "~SectionID" name "~Title" section "~Section" teacher "~TeacherEmail"

The script also checks to see if the teacher for the section has changed, and if it has, it runs the following (also preceded by a bunch of CSV stuff):

gam update course "d:~~SectionID~~" name "~Title" section "~Section" owner "~TeacherEmail"

This has seemed to work well for us in the past, and has worked well again so far to create our new Google Classrooms for 2021-2022 (students just reported back on Wednesday, so we're already up and running with that) ... but I'm seeing some weird things with changing the Classroom owner.

For one, when the second command runs to change the Classroom owner but the Classroom is still in a provisioned state, the new owner hasn't been able to see the Classroom at all to accept or decline. I've had numerous teachers report this to me, and I've had to use GAM to change the state to active.

Worse, running "gam course info" on these courses reports that the owner has been changed, but in practice, the owner does NOT seem to have been changed. I added myself as a student in one such class and did a screen share with the "new" owner to see what she saw, and here's what I observed:

- the new owner did not have the ability to remove the old teacher, which I thought owners could do (she said that the old teacher did have the ability to remove the new one, although I was only observing the new teacher's screen, so I couldn't verify)

- as a student, the old teacher's name and profile picture was listed on the class card instead of the new teacher

Again: the new teacher was listed as the owner when I ran "gam course info" so this is baffling to me. Any ideas on how to resolve this would be most appreciated.

[Shaun Creighton]

FOLLOW UP

I had a support chat with Google today and gave them a specific example of this. They said that according to their system, the original owner of the Classroom was still listed as the owner, and that the 
"new" owner had an invitation to become the owner, but didn't accept it yet.

Oddly, when I used Google's API explorers (specifically courses.get and userProfiles.get) to pull that data myself, it listed the new owner as the Classroom owner, with the old teacher as a co-teacher, which matches what GAM is reporting, too.

Of course they couldn't explain the discrepancy ... :|