6.4.2 Announcements and bulk emails
Course subject(s)
6. Teach your blended course
Announcements
The first announcement
The initial announcement should be an informal introduction to the course. What kind of message will entice participants to interact with each other in your course? How will updates impact on the behaviour of your participants.
Weekly announcements
Each week, let the learners know what they have to do in assignments and what important content and events they have coming up.
Grades and Feedback
Once you finish grading and complete feedback for all students, let them know in an announcement so that the students can double-check their grades and see the feedback. If you create this pattern, fewer students will ask you if you graded their assignments as they get used to the process.
Ending the course
Do you have major assignments at the end of the course? Remind the students when those deadlines are and how they can get help before the deadlines close.
Emailing all learners (bulk emails)
Be cautious when using this feature.
Inform the participants
For online courses, you can send bulk email messages to course participants directly from the Course Admin or instructor tab, depending on the platform. The advantage of this feature is that the participant gets the message without going to platform. This is a good way to remind them to participate in discussions and to come back to the course, if their participation is flagging.
In the email, you can direct participants to interesting discussion threads, summarize a discussion or provide an interesting conclusion of a discussion.
It is important to show your appreciation for the contribution of the participants. Every contribution is unique, and good contributions to activities can be highlighted in the email.
Before you use the bulk email feature, consider that messages cannot be cancelled after they are sent. If you plan to send a message to all course participants, be sure to review each draft carefully, and send the message to yourself first for thorough testing.
Emails can use HTML styling, and can include keywords that personalise and links to videos, social media pages, and other material. In fact, always provide the email with a direct link to the course page, the activity or the discussion.
Try to personalize the email as if you are writing to 1 participant. You can even use keywords to add the participants name automatically.
All course contributors who are assigned the course staff or instructor role can use bulk emails to communicate with course participants before, during and after the course run.
For templates that you can use when preparing your own messages, see the templates in the next section.
Blending your Education by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://digitelpro.eadtu.eu/course-programmes/blended-education/
