Emailing students in a course

Quickmail

You can email an entire class or selected students using the Quickmail feature. Look for the Quickmail block on the right column of a course. Click Compose Course Message and select the recipients. Select All in course or choose specific individuals, roles, or groups to email. Compose your email and click Send Message at the bottom of the screen.

Advanced Use

You can send email separately to course groups if you use groups in your course
It is possible to add additional non-course users with the Additional Emails field
Emails can be scheduled using the "Send at" option near the bottom of the page
The user data fields allow message personalization. For example, entering "Dear [:firstname:]" will insert each recipient's first name into the message
By default, only students cannot use Quickmail, but there is a setting to permit students to send emails.

Other Quickmail Information

Quickmail keeps a history of all sent messages which is available under the "View Sent Messages" link on the Quickmail block on the course page.

By default, Quickmail is not available to students. If you would like students in your course or organization to be able to use Quickmail, send a request to support@swarthmore.edu and the settings will be adjusted.

If this Quickmail block is missing from your course, see the "Adding Blocks" section of the Blocks page to add the Quickmail block to your course.

Announcements

You can use the "Announcements" forum to create messages that are displayed in Moodle as well as sent to the students in the course. Every course is created with a Announcements item in the top block. Adding a new topic will create a post in the Announcements, add an entry to the "Latest News" block in Moodle, and email your students.

Remember that any Announcements you make will get emailed to your students (even test posts!).

Faculty Services

Faculty Services provides a listing of all the emails for the students registered for your course. You can copy and paste the listing from Faculty Services to your email program. Some people create contact lists for their courses using this feature.

When to use which feature?

For a general announcement, any of the above methods are fine. The Announcements area provides more places for a notice to show up, which is good for important events such as due dates for papers and not as good for reminders about who is bringing a snack for tomorrow's class.