Moodle provides a range of options for communicating out course information to students whether it is sending comms to individual students, to those on a module or to a whole programme of students (with the potential of filtering these comms to different year groups).
The best tools to use to communicate with your students on Moodle are Announcements, Quickmail and Messaging Selected Course Participants. See the below comparison chart for a quick overview to find out what tool could work best for for you.
| Features | Messaging | Quickmail | Announcements |
|---|---|---|---|
| Message more than one person at a time | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message individuals across courses | ✓ (via messaging) | ||
| Message the entire module | ✓ (via course participants) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message a group in a module | ✓ (via course participants) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message more than one group at a time in a module | ✓ | ||
| Get notified of message via email | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Student replies | ✓ (via messaging) | ||
| Save message history | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Include attachments (files, media) | ✓ | ✓ |
Scheduler
Using the Scheduler activity allows you to specify time slots for meetings, which students then choose on Moodle. Staff can in turn record that the student attended, make notes about the meeting – and optionally assign a grade – within the scheduler. The scheduler sends reminders to both students and staff and allows either to cancel the appointment and book another time. The scheduler also supports group meeting, where multiple students can sign up at one time. It also allows staff to assign students to attend a meeting at a particular time.
Face to face
Using the Face-to-face activity/plugin is used to manage bookings for workshops or training sessions where an advanced booking is required. Each activity can offer one session or multiple sessions on the same topic with different locations, capacity and timings offered where required. Confirmation emails are sent when users sign-up for a session or cancel. Reminder emails are sent a few days before the session. Additionally, it enables recording attendance at sessions; attendance records can then be exported for further analysis.
Programme sites can be used by staff to deliver general information to students about the programme, thus avoiding having to add content and send out comms from each module site. For example, if you had a communication to send to all students on the programme you could send it from this site using the announcements forum or any other forums you choose to set up. Please note that the announcements forum will not receive messages from students, all other forums will. If the announcements forum is hidden it will not send out messages to students email. It is also possible to filter your message to different year groups, to do this make use of the automatic year groups set up in the programme site. Please be aware that Study Abroad students are not enrolled onto Programme sites and so will not be able to view content or receive information. If you would like a Programme site set up on Moodle please ask the programme convenor to request one from your eLearning Advisor or from the Moodle helpdesk.