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Student support

If you want to contact all of your site participants, you can choose from the following options:

1. Send an email via regular UofM email system
• Why is it recommended?
2. Use Quickmail block
3. Force your participants to be subscribed to one of your forums
4. Send an instant message via People block

1. Send an email via regular UofM email system (recommended)

If you are teaching an academic course, you may look up the list of your students' emails in UM Reports.

• Go to https://www.umreports.umn.edu
• Login and search for the report titled Class List
• Browse to your course by selecting term, institution, subject area, and class number
• You will see all students registered for your course. Scroll down and click Email All Students link at the bottom. You will get a list of emails, which you can copy and paste into the To: field in you email client (e.g. http://mail.umn.edu)

Why regular emails are recommended?
aka Why not all students got my message sent via Quickmail, Forum, or Messenger?

1. Depending on the time the student officially registered, s/he may still be missing from the Moodle site (and thus will not appear in the Quickmail block, or become subscribed to a forum) - especially at the beginning of the semester, when students add/drop courses a lot.
2. Some users decide not to receive email communication from Moodle server, and disable their emails  in their own Moodle profiles. This is quite rear, but it can happen.
3. Some users change their emails in Moodle from default UofM addresses to something else.
   If that email provider will decide for some reason that the message is spam, it will be blocked.

2. Use Quickmail block

Add a Quickmail block to your site homepage and send emails immediately to an individual, group or whole class.

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If people are subscribed to a forum in Moodle, it means that they will receive a copy of all forum postings via email.

What you can do, as an instructor, is to "force" everyone to be subscribed to a particular forum (e.g. to the default "News forum"), and use it to make important announcements. Your postings will be kept on the forum and also will be sent via email to site participants.

To force subscriptions:

• Go to a forum
• Click Update this Forum button
• Under "Force everyone to be subscribed via email?" select Yes, forever or Yes, initially
• Click Save changes

More information can be found here.

When exactly students will get an email from a forum?

• Review: Frequency of email from a forum

4. Send an instant message via People block

If your site homepage has a People block, you may send instant messages in bulk to the participants.

Note that this message will be send via build-in Moodle instant messenger. If people are online, they will receive it there. If participants are offline, then they will get a copy of your message via their regular email.

• Click Participants link in the block
• Scroll down and click Select all button, then choose Add/send message
• Type your message on the next screen, click Preview, click Send