Moodle

isn't it better to do this via a forum on the course page that forces everyone to be subscribed? - that way, it sends an e-mail, and a record of it is kept within the course that is viewable by students and staff? - In my experience I've found a lot of students never check their "official" university/college/school e-mail accounts, as they rely on their free gmail/hotmail/yahoo accounts etc.. whereas they might check the course page for lecture notes/course information a lot more often.

using a forced subscription forum to manage this is really good as it keeps all course related information in one place - (your course homepage) - but also makes use of the e-mail medium as well.

ahh. - I see the quickmail block allows you to select a subset of students to send an e-mail to... forums don't let you do this.... your description in this bug "teacher be able to e-mail Students, en-masse in a course" is possible in core moodle at the moment by using a discussion forum. however, e-mailing a selectable subset of users within a forum is not.

Yes. Not only does QuickMail allow e-mailing student subsets, it e-mails immediately. Forums do neither, at least as far as I've seen. The key word here is "immediately." Forum posts don't appear in my e-mail Inbox for hours-at least-and usually don't appear for more than a day. Of course, I just may not know how to use forums so that postings are dispatched immediately to all subscribers' e-mail addresses. That's probably what I'm not understanding correctly. At any rate, I think that my request to reclassify QuickMail as a core feature has considerable merit. My colleagues and I used QuickMail extensively in earlier Moodle versions to alert students to last minutes changes in assignments, and other time-critical announcements. I hope that Moodle developers will consider my request.

aha! there's a little checkbox at the bottom of the page when posting a new discussion topic called "mail now" - tick the box and it sends it right then!

Thanks, Dan. I've always done exactly as you indicated, so something else must be involved in delaying our forum e-mails. I'll talk with our Moodle administrator.

I would say that quickmail is a very good block. For us, a very important feature is the ability to select only certain students or sets of students to receive the message. Quickmail does support attachments, and it keeps a history of messages. It allows for a subject line, which helps distinguish messages. In addition, when the message is sent is not affected by user digest settings. IMHO, forums do not provide these particular features.

I agree with A.T. Wyatt; Quickmail's ability to send attachments, use groups, keep a message history and have individualized subjects are all pluses, as is the ability to instantly send a message. Yes, you can choose the "send now" message from a forum ... but I'm guessing that if someone's in digest mode, they won't get that message any sooner than they normally would.

Quickmail provides an alternative method of reaching students, one that satisfies certain use cases that forums do not. Plus, it's functionality that Blackboard has, and that new faculty coming from that LMS expect. It's a block we've used extensively since going live with Moodle, and at this point I'd say it's an essential part of our roll out.

Note that you can also send messages from the participants page, to everyone or a subset of people.

I personally think the messaging functionality should be enhanced to give it whatever else is missing, rather than making it a new block.

The problem of sending messages from the participants page is that it's not really that straight-forward (from novice users' perspective), as you have to go into the "Participants" link (from the "People" block), then use the "Select all" button (or, use the NOT_SO_USER_FRIENDLY checkboxes to click one by one), then look for the pull-down menu (which is sort of hiding on the bottom of the page), then select the "Add / send message".. there are a lot of steps, not to mention that the "Add / send message" feature does NOT support (1) Adding a "Subject" line to your message/email, (2) Groups, (3) Email attachment(s), (4) Email history, (5) Possibility to use "external email client" (e.g. Exchange, Thunderbird, etc.), and (6) capability to allow/restrict students to use this feature. Quickmail (and the "Quickmail for large classes") support all these. This is just my 2 cents. I will also vote for adding this to the core too so that the codes can be cleaned up a little bit by other core Moodle developers, and be constantly maintained. Besides, I will be reassigned to handle other projects in our campus in the near future, so I might not have time to keep maintaining the Quickmail projects in the future. Thanks!