Moodle - Instructor-to-Learner Communication
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Moodle has the following tools for instructor-to-learner communication out of the box, with many others available in their plugin directory:
Fascinatingly, there is no native feature that allows instructors to directly email learners in a course from within the platform, either individually or in bulk. That functionality is commonly provided by a plugin called Quickmail. Instructors commonly download a list of learners, and use their email addresses to email them directly.
Lessons Learned from Moodle
If you simply repurpose tools intended for user-to-user communication, you can get more value out of the functionality than creating specific tools for instructors alone.
In Moodle, there are no tools purely designed for instructor communication, simply instructor functionality built into existing tools - the discussion forum and messaging system.
The more barriers you put between users and announcements, the less likely they are to see them.
If you send users emails about their messages and announcements, they will try to reply via email. It’s important that those replies do not go into a black hole or no-reply address.
A lot of younger users are more used to chat interfaces than email. Modern messaging systems should probably more closely resemble Slack/Discord, or Whatsapp/Messenger than Outlook.
Announcements/News Forum
The announcements forum (also referred to inconsistently in the platform as the News Forum) is a special forum activity that is given the role of being that course’s announcement forum. A course may only have one announcement forum, and by default, posting into the forum is restricted to staff members. It is automatically created when a course is created, and learners can be automatically emailed 30 minutes after a new post is made in the announcements forum. This delay is intended to allow staff to make edits to the post before a copy of the announcement post is sent out to learners.
The posts from the announcement forum are automatically pulled through to UI elements that aggregate the most recent announcements, such as the “Latest Announcements” block in the course sidebar.
It is, for all other intents and purposes, simply a restricted forum that is prioritised in the UI, and has no other special functionality available to it.
This feature satisfies the following needs for communication:
One-to-All
And honestly, it’s not super great, users have to click through the forums to find the announcements, and none of the body content is visible until you open the post, which is two clicks deep, so it’s very reliant on that automated email.
Messaging
The Moodle messaging system is a chat-style interface that appears in the message tray, a drawer interface that appears on the right hand side of the UI:
Users can also access their messages from the dedicated messaging page, which shows the messages in a two-column layout instead:
Users can see the profiles of users who message them, star and add specific users they want to keep up with (such as their personal tutor, or friends in the course), block users, report them to staff, mute specific conversations, and delete conversations from their inbox. When a conversation is deleted by a user, it only disappears for that user, not all users in that conversation, but staff can delete messages for all users instead.
Users can opt in to receiving notifications via email, mobile app, or both when they receive a message, and who can message the user can be restricted from the user’s end, for example only allowing users that have been added to their contact list to send a message.
Messages are not only used for instructor communication, but also peer communication, and even communication between learners on completely different courses, depending on how the site is configured. As is typical for Moodle features, permissions can be assigned at a granular level, allowing administrators to create roles that can and cannot use each part of the messaging system.
This system is intended to replace the need to email users outside of the platform, hence the lack of native emailing functionality, but this comes with issues, one of the most common being that when learners receive email notifications, they reply via email, which does not go to the conversation.
Specifically for instructor communication, Moodle allows course staff to send messages to learners directly in bulk:
This can be based on a basic list of users in the course, or by using a complex system of filters and criteria to identify users in specific groups:
Messaging can also be used with Moodle’s analytics functionality:
Essentially anywhere there is a display of users, Moodle provides the option to message that user for intervention.