ARCHIVED: In Oncourse, what tools are available for managing site communication?

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Important:

Oncourse is retired. For details, see ARCHIVED: About the Oncourse retirement.

Two distinct tools, Email Archive and Messages, are available for managing communication between site participants, while the Announcements tool is useful for one-way communication. Additionally, other site tools allow you to send email notifications to participants when you add new items.

On this page:

Email Archive
Messages
Announcements
Email notification

Email Archive

Each site participant can use the ARCHIVED: Email Archive to mail all site participants at once. You cannot use it to send mail to an individual or a group within the site.

You send messages using your email account, and recipients receive messages in their email accounts. Copies of messages are kept in the Email Archive tool.

Messages

All site participants can use ARCHIVED: Messages to send messages to one or more site participants, a defined group, all participants with a certain role, or all site participants at once.

Site participants can choose to have all of their messages for a particular site automatically delivered to their preferred email address; see ARCHIVED: Modifying settings in Messages.

Users with an administrative role (instructors, assistants, and project owners) can determine the options available for sending a copy of a message to the email addresses of all recipients, even those who have not chosen to have all of their messages forwarded; see ARCHIVED: Modifying settings in Messages.

A copy of the message will always go to each recipient's Received folder in Messages, as well as to email, if applicable.

Note: You cannot reply to Messages from the forwarded email messages; to reply, go to the Messages tool in your site.

Announcements

You can use ARCHIVED: Announcements to send a one-way communication to your entire site or to a defined group.

All announcements are stored in your site's Announcements tool, and will appear in Announcements in each participant's My Workspace site. Additionally, if you set the Email Notification option to High - All participants, your announcement will be sent directly to all participants' email addresses.

Email notification

Some tools (e.g., Announcements, Resources, and Syllabus) allow you to send email notifications to site participants when you add new items. You can specify a low-priority email notification, which will be subject to each participant's notification preferences, or high priority, which will override individually set preferences so that all site participants receive the notification.