If you want an announcement to be emailed to your students at a pre-defined time this is now possible using the ‘Display period’ settings in a forum post.
You might want to schedule a reminder for your students or perhaps a summary of what you will be covering in the coming week.
To schedule an announcement, follow the steps below:
- Go to the ‘Announcements’ forum activity in your Moodle course and Add a new topic as you would normally.
- Enter the ‘Subject’ and ‘Message’. Before clicking on Post to forum, click on the Advanced link to reveal some additional settings:
- Under the ‘Display period’ settings, you can then set the ‘Display start’ date and time.
- The ‘Display start’ date and time determines when the post will be visible to students (before that time it will not appear in the ‘Announcements’ forum); it also determines when the announcement will be marked for email to students (typically the email is sent within minutes after the pre-defined time).
- If you only want the announcement to appear in the ‘Announcements’ forum for a specific period of time, you can also set the ‘Display end’ date and time. If the ‘Display end’ checkbox is ticked, the post will be hidden once the date and time is reached, otherwise it will remain visible once it has appeared.
- Click on Post to forum to confirm the announcement.
- When you return to the ‘Announcements’ forum, you will notice that the recently-added post has been added with a ‘Timed’ label. This post will not be visible to your students until the defined ‘Display start’ date and time has been reached:
Forum posts as emails
The ‘Announcements’ forum is configured to email any announcements to all course participants (if the course is not hidden). The process explained above can also be applied to posts in a standard ‘Forum’ activity in Moodle but emails will only be sent to those subscribed to the forum.