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Question

Open Sessions Not working

  • October 28, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 33 views
Praise

Hello, 

 

I am education verified, but some of the students I work with are not. For them, I have used open sessions when we have live class activities. For some reason, it’s not working anymore. It keeps telling them that they have no editing access even when the first message that comes on their screen is that they can add text, draw, and add images on the figjam. Yet last week it was working. It has disrupted a lot of activities. Please help me out. 

 

Also, I thought that even if someone is not education verified they can still edit a file but will lose access within a week? Kindly clarify that for me. 

3 replies

Praise
  • Praise
  • Author
  • New Participant
  • October 28, 2025

I just tried logging out and accessing the open session and it worked. It seems a bit counter intuitive if without a figma account open sessions work, but not when I am using a figma account (I have another figma account that’s not education verified and it’s the one I used to test the problem out). Dear Figma team, your help in solving this dilemma would be highly appreciated.

Tom Reem
Figmate
  • Tom Reem
  • Figmate
  • October 29, 2025

Hi ​@Praise — welcome to Figma Forum, and thanks for bringing this up. Sorry to hear about the trouble getting Open Sessions to work as expected.

You’re right, those on the Education plan can invite others to participate in an Open Session, which grants temporary edit access to a FigJam file for up to 24 hours. You can review how that feature works here: Invite visitors to an open session.

A couple things that may help narrow down what’s happening:

  1. Session expiration
    → Can you check with the students you invited if they tried to join after the 24-hour access window ended?
    → Try creating a new Open Session link and have them join shortly after it’s generated to confirm if the same issue occurs.
  2. File location
    → Ensure the FigJam file hasn’t been moved into your Drafts folder since sharing — that can interrupt the session link.

Additionally, a quick heads-up — we’re currently in the process of updating Education teams without a reverified owner, which can impact access or sharing permissions. You can find more details here: Updates to our Figma Education plan.

Hope this helps get things back on track! Please keep me posted on whether these checks make a difference — and reply back with any specific error messages or screenshots of unexpected outcomes. Happy to help escalate if needed. 🙏🏻

Praise
  • Praise
  • Author
  • New Participant
  • November 3, 2025

Hello ​@Tom Reem , apologies for the late reply but thank you for your response.

It’s not a session expiration problem because I invite them on the spot and we work on the jam for only an hour. Also, none of the files I’ve tried sharing are on drafts; I have double checked to ensure that.  

My students have just had to log out of their Figma accounts for now to get the open sessions working for them, but at least it we can still work on projects and ideas together. Hopefully after the updates things will be back to normal. 

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