Moodle: Communicating through Announcements and Quickmail

In this guide:

About Moodle
Communicating through Announcements
Using Groups for Announcements
Adding a Quickmail block

About Moodle

Moodle has two primary tools for communicating with students – Announcements and Quickmail.

Announcements are ideal for updating students with important information about coursework, events, and changes to the schedule. Messages posted through the announcements tool are also sent to students’ emails making it invaluable when you need to contact your entire class.

Quickmail is a useful tool for adhoc communication with individuals and groups of students. Quickmails enables you to select specific recipients; however, unlike the Announcements tool, there is no record of your message for staff and students to revisit on Moodle. For this reason, we recommend using the announcements tool for the majority of messages.

Communicating through Announcements

Open the Announcements area.

Select Add discussion topic which will expand to add your announcement Subject, Message, Group selection (where applicable).

Add a title in the Subject then the body of the Message before Posting to forum. If you select Post a copy to all groups, you will send one copy of the message for every group to every enrolled tutor. For example, if you have 150 course groups in your unit and while this option is ticked, all the tutors will receive 150 copies of the same message, leading to spam. To avoid this while sending the same message to all groups, please keep this option unticked and under Group drop-down menu, select All Participants instead.

Advanced Forum Announcement Settings

‘Pinned’ messages remain at the top of the announcements area. To post an announcement to forum with ‘Pinned’ messages, click on the Advanced option at the bottom before writing your announcement, and tick the Pinned option before posting your announcement.

Should you wish to share file in your forum post, before writing your message, click on the Advanced option at the bottom of the page and under the ‘Attachment’ section, and you will be able to attach files such as pdf files or images. We recommend posting images inside of your message/text editor.

If your scheduled event is time sensitive and you would like to post your announcement between a set timeframe; before writing your message, click on the Advanced option at the bottom of the page and under ‘Display Period’ option, expand the window and set your display start and end times before posting to forum.

Using Groups for Announcements

Groups can be used to:

Selectively reveal content and activities to specific groups.
Control who receives announcements and Quickmail notifications.
Create Moodle chatrooms for specific groups of students.

How to create a group:

Go to Moodle, login and go to the relevant Moodle site.
Select the Open/Close Course menu tab to expand for more options, and then select the Participants tab.

Under the Enrolled users dropdown list, select Groups.

Scroll down and select Create Group.

Add a Group Name and optionally add a brief description. If you are planning to message this group in your group announcements/forum posts, please ensure to enable its group setting by selecting ‘Yes’ under ‘Group messaging’. If selected ‘No’, this group will not appear under the group messaging options in the announcement page. Click ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom to create your group.

Select the desired or newly created group first from the list, and then select Add/Remove Users.

Add users from the potential members column to the group members column using the < Add button. Once you have formed your group, you can close your browser as it will save your settings while moving students from potential members to group members.