Academics can communicate with students via the Moodle course messaging options or a communication-focused activity.
The most commonly used options are:
- Sending an email via the course participants page: Great for sending an immediate email that is reliable.
- Announcements forum: Easy to use but can take time to reach students depending on their email digest preferences.
Communicating with students individually, or in their separate groups, as well as addressing the whole class, can give them a positive sense of engagement with their learning experience. They are more likely to be active and responsive participants in the course if they can see that time was taken to monitor and comment on their individual progress.
Common Activities
Academics can build communication-focused activities as an additional option for communicating with the course. Activities are great for providing a place for communication where students can revisit.
Announcement Forums. Provide announcements that are sent out to students as an email and are available to view in the course. All courses come with an announcements forum.
Forum. Provide a location for academics and students to make posts and respond to posts.
Dialogue. Start one to one text chats.
Chat. Create a basic text chatroom.
Choice. Quickly poll students with a single multiple choice.
Feedback. Create a survey targetted at receiving feedback.
Questionnaire. Create a detailed survey with options for displaying automatic responses to students.
Send an Email
Academics can use the participants page to send emails to students using their preferred email client. Moodle will simply populate the "To" field of the email with selected students from the Moodle participants list.
As with all bulk emails, take care when sending out emails to a large group. UNSW IT has advised that you should not attempt to send out messages using the Moodle email tool to more than 400 users.
The following browsers are incompatible with the Send an Email tool:
- Google Chrome (on Windows)
- Edge
- Other browsers may be affected
If the Send an Email function does not work, try using an alternative browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Send an Email to Specific Students via Filters
Emails can be sent to specific participants using the filters provided in the 'Participants' page. Commonly used filters include sending emails to specific groups, roles and keywords.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Send an Email from a UNSW SOE Computer
When Moodle generates an email list from its email tool, it separates the recipients' names with commas. But Outlook's default setting is for semi-colons to be used to separate multiple message recipients.
If you are using Outlook on a computer that has been set up with the UNSW Standard Operating Environment (SOE), you will need to change this setting so that Outlook recognises commas as recipient separators.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Send a Moodle Message
Academics can send Moodle Messages to student's notifications section in Moodle. These messages are less prominent than emails, and is not commonly used for important notifications.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.