You can communicate with learners through announcements. In the course settings, you can find the button called the button 'News', where you can create newsletters for all the enrolled learners. The messages will be sent to learners by email and will be displayed in their profiles. Please remember that the mailing of announcements may not start precisely on the set time, as it gets in the queue within an hour after the set time and is sent out with a speed of 2 letters per second if there are no other letters in line.
Newsletter editor
Letters are edited in the Stepik template. You can customize text and subject of the letter (instead of News)
You also can:
- Send an example letter to yourself (we recommend doing this before each mailing);
- Send it to all the learners in the course;
- Create a uniform welcoming letter for newly enrolled;
- Configure mailing according to date and learners’ progress.
After you press Send, the newsletter goes to On hold. If it is a one-time letter, after sending it gets a Sent status; if it is a repeated one, it stays On hold.
You can cancel mailing, it makes the letter status change to Interrupted.
Recommendations
A list of necessary announcements in every course:
Make sure to
- let learners know about the start day of the course and all the important information, including deadlines, assignment types and the content of the course etc.;
- announce the opening dates of the new modules;
- identify the frequently asked questions and provide answers to them;
- provide comments on difficult assignments;
- provide learners with additional information on the content of the course;
- let the learners know about certificates and congratulate them on completing the course;
- let the learners know if the course will be relaunched.
You can also ask learners to recommend your course to their friends and give links to other useful courses.
We recommend including important information in your course itself, as some learners might unsubscribe from announcements. For example, if you send out additional materials, upload them to the lesson they are most useful for.
When you send out the newsletter, each learner will also receive their own progress report in there.
Additional settings
Restriction by points
Send the newsletter only to the people with a certain amount of points. For example, if a learner can get a maximum of 242 points in your course, you can manage the newsletter so that learners with the top 50 percent (121 - 242 points) will get a different message from the bottom 50% (0 - 121). Note that learners who received 121 points will get two emails. To avoid that, try to set the percentage of the learners in a way that would produce a fraction when multiplied by the number of points (e.g. 49% and 51%).
Welcome letter
Set an automatic newsletter that will be sent to a person at the moment of the course registration. It's very important to create this newsletter if your course is self-paced.
Setting a date
Set the date when the newsletter is supposed to be sent. By default, the newsletter will be sent the moment you hit the 'Send' button. If you want to send the newsletter later you can set the date. You can also set intervals between the sending of the letter. If the box 'send announcement forever' is ticked, the announcement will be sent out every day in a given interval unless you stop it.
Mailings
You can create news not only for courses separately, but also in general for all learners who are subscribed to your Stepik user profile.
Initially, the number of subscribers is made up of all learners enrolled in all courses you create.
Then learners can subscribe/unsubscribe from your newsletters regardless of course registration.
Mailings can be set to now or a specific date.