Instructor

Announcements

1 min 18 sec

This program has a robust communication system. There are 4 parts:

1- Announcements (covered in this segment)

2- Notifications (covered in the next segment)

3- Private messages (covered in the segment 7)

4- Watch Lists (covered in segment 8)

Each of the 4 categories functions a little differently and it behooves an instructor understand what each does. 

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Announcements

Only instructors can post announcements. Announcements are used by instructors to send messages to everyone in a specific class or everyone in all the classes of a specific course at once. This is a powerful tool to communicate with students. Instructors can let students know when content has been updated. It's a way to tell a class what date and time a round table chat will be held. It's also a way for instructors to tell students who have taken a course that the instructor now has a whole new course available. 

Announcements only deal with one course, or set of classes, at a time. If an instructor has created multiple courses (i.e 5 courses) and they wanted to tell all the students who have taken their other courses that there is now a brand new course, the instructor would have to make 5 announcements (one in each course).

Students will see announcements on their homepage when they log in, or when they go to a course they’re enrolled in.

2 min 41 sec

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Creating an Announcement

Creating an announcement begins by navigating to the class you wish to make the announcement to. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to select the black Classes Tab on the sidebar. Then select the class you wish to make the announcement to. In this case, we select Test sample class created for this tutorial. See image below.

Selecting test sample brings up the screen below. You will see Class Home on the left and Test Sample on the right of the taskbar. Keep in mind that the arrow on the Test Sample needs to be pointed UP. When the arrow is up, you are on the class home task bar. That's where you will find the Announcement tab which is circled in the image.

Selecting the Announcement tab brings up the window below where the instructor simply selects the red New Announcement

Selecting the red New Announcement tab brings up the New Announcement window - see image below

From the New Announcement window, the instructor has the option to send an announcement to one or all of their classes.

Once POST ANNOUNCEMENT  at bottom of the page is selected the announcement will go into the Students CLASS HOME page for the students to read.