Faculty can email students in their classes through the Quickmail Block or Participants List in Moodle.

Quickmail Block

Look for your Quickmail Block to the lower right-hand side of your course site. Click "Compose New Message" and see below for continued instructions. 

Participants List

The list has been highly modified by Amherst and these instructions will not work on other Moodle installations.

Access the participants list by going to the Navigation > My courses > Course Name > Participants. This will bring up the course roster.

There are four ways to send email from the roster.

1. Emailing the entire class

Click on the Email this course button. This will email everyone included in the course. This can include librarians, course coordinators and TAs.

2. Emailing every class member with a particular role(s)

Click on the Email By Role line near the top of the page. Then click on the roles that should receive the email. Finally click on the Submit button. The All Students role includes everyone with a student or petitioner role.

3. Emailing a group of individuals

Click the checkbox beneath the name of every person to receive the email. Above the list of participants, click on the Send an email link after the With selected users... prompt.

4. Emailing an Individual

To send email to a single individual, simply click on their email address.

The Quickmail Interface

Choose who you'd like to send the message to. If you've arrived here through the Participants list you will have this set already. 
 

Fill out the subject and message body...

The “Supported user data fields” is an optional but interesting feature that lets you make your messages more personalized, similar to a Mail Merge. For example, if you add the text “Hi [:firstname:]” to the message body, each student will get an email with their own first name in the message body (ie “Hi Joe”). 

At the bottom you can add attachments (see below), set an email signature, or choose to send the message at a later time. If you want to get a copy of the email, be sure to select “Yes” for “Receive a send report”.

Click "Send Message" when you are ready!

A Note About Attachments

• In the new Quickmail, the email recipient will receive links to the attached files instead of traditional attachments. All the recipient has to do is click the link to download the attachment.
• An email with multiple attachments will contain a link to a ZIP file containing all the attachments. Simply click the link to download the zip file, unzip it, and you will have a folder on your computer with all the files. 

Sent Messages in Gmail

• After sending a message through Moodle, you will see one message for each recipient in your Gmail sent messages folder. 
• This provides added verification for you that messages were sent, and lets you follow up as needed outside of Moodle. 
• If a message is sent to a large number of recipients (ie 30+), you may only see sent messages for some of the recipients. Be assured that all recipients will have received the message, this is just due to how Moodle batch-processes the messages. You can always check your email history in Moodle to double check. 
• It is possible to set a filter in Gmail to remove these messages from your Sent folder. Contact askIT@amherst.edu for help with this.