How to inform students

  • To send announcements (emails), use the Announcements forum.
  • Encourage your students to ask their questions on General forum instead of using private messaging.

Inform your students by sending Announcements

Use the Announcements forum to send urgent announcements to course participants. The Announcements forum is for one-way messaging only: from teachers to students.

All posts in this forum are shown to course members only. An email alert containing the message is sent to members.


Sending an announcement with email notification to students

  1. Click Add a new topic on the right column of the workspace
    1. Fill in the subject title in the Subject field and the content in the Message field
    2. Check the box Send forum post notifications with no editing-time delay. If not ticked, you have 15 minutes to edit your post before sending an email. You can also set a display period for your message (for how long it is visible)
    3. Click Post to forum

      OR

  2. In the Course home page
    1. Click Announcements
    2. Click Add a new topic
    3. Fill in the subject title in the Subject field and the content in the Message field
    4. Check the Send forum post notifications with no editing-time delay. If not ticked, you have 15 minutes to edit your post before sending an emil. You can also set a display period for your message (for how long it is visible)
    5. Click Post to forum


Adding an attachment to an announcement

Before sending an attachment, consider whether the information in the attachment is better suited to be distributed as a course material resource. If yes, add the file in the desired place in the workspace (see adding Files and folders), and, if seen as necessary, you send an annoucement to inform students about the availability of the uploaded resource. If not, send the attachment as follows:

  1. Add a new announcement topic as described above (either upto 1b. or 2d.)
  2. Click on Advanced below the Message box to open a drag-and-drop box below the Message box
  3. Drag-and-drop the attachment file to be sent
  4. Click Post to forum

Use Announcements to inform small groups

If you have groups in your workspace, you can inform and send an email to one group only using the Announcements forum. To do this, first set Group mode in the Announcements settings.

Open the Announcement's Editing settings (gear). Click Common module settings, and choose Group mode (visible or separate groups). Choose also Grouping if needed. For details on grouping, see Groups and groupings.

When adding a new topic, you can choose whether you want to inform all participants or one group.

General Discussion /Forum

A discussion forum is for course participants. It can be used for internal discussion, posting questions about course content, forming groups and so on. The teacher can create additional forums.

How to subscribe to General discussion

In General discussion, click the gear in the upper right corner → Click Subscribe to this forum.

How to subscribe all Forums

Click the Forums-link in the header image to see a list of all forums in your workspace. Click Subscribe to all forums in upper right corner.


Teachers can open MyCourses forums to the world by enabling guest access.

Read MyCourses workspace and material visibility before altering a forum's visibility settings

  • How to open the Forum to all Aalto/Haka users: open News Forum → Forum Administration → Permissions → View Discussions → click the + sign → select Authenticated user (Aalto/Haka user) → Allow TARKISTA
  • How to open the Forum to the world, i.e. guests (not logged in users): open News Forum →Forum Administration → Permissions → View Discussions → click the + sign → select Guest (not logged in user) → Allow TARKISTA

Messages

You can send and receive private messages, too. Messages open in upper row. You can disable receiving messages from non-contacts.

More info on messaging: https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Messaging