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.
A list of necessary announcements in every course:
- it's necessary 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 on 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.
When you send out the newsletter, each learner will also receive their own progress report in that newsletter.
Additional settings:
1. Send the newsletter only to the people with a certain amount of points. For example, in case a learner can get a maximum of 242 points in your course, you can manage the newsletter so that learners with 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%).
2. 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.
3. 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 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.
Note, that the emails might start to be sent out a bit later than the set time since they first have to be queued up and the email is sent with the speed of 2 emails per second.
You can check if the email looks the way you'd want it to look by sending it to your own email address (button 'Send example to myself')
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Mailings
You can create news not only for courses separately, but also in general for all learners who are subscribed to your page (profile) on Stepik.
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:
