How can I remind students about tasks they must complete?
Students often ask to be notified of events in their course sites, such as upcoming assignment or assessment due dates and whether items have been graded.
Many UVACollab tools include options to notify site participants of various activities and help them keep track of their completed or graded work. This article lists tools that include these options, with links to articles explaining how to use them.
Automatically display scheduled messages and important dates.
Announcements
When you create or edit an announcement, you can specify the dates when it will be available. You can schedule an announcement to be posted at a specific date and time by setting a Beginning date.
You may also enable email notification for your announcements, which sends the text of the announcement to site participants via email. If the announcement also has a Beginning date set, the email notification will be sent at the specified date and time.
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Calendar
Add the Calendar to your site to display important events from other tools, such as assignment and assessment due dates. You may publish your calendar to let students import events from it into other calendars they may use, such as Google Calendar.
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Help students keep track of upcoming and completed work.
Assignments
Assignments works together with the Calendar and Announcements tools, if you have them in your site. When you create or edit an assignment, you may automatically add the due date for the assignment to the Calendar. You can also choose to add an announcement about the open date to Announcements.
You can also enable an option to notify students via email when you release grades for the assignment.
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Lessons
Use Lessons to structure your course activities to make it easier for students to access the content they need and to engage with learning materials.
Add a checklist for each week, unit, or topic to help students keep track of the activities they completed and manage their time. Use checklists to break down complex assignments into discrete tasks that students can check off progressively. This will help students who may feel overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do. You will also be able to review the items that your students checked off.
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Tip: This blog post from the Center for Teaching Excellence (opens new window) includes more information about using Lessons to encourage student engagement.
Tests & Quizzes
When you publish a test or quiz, you may send an automatic email notification to students to let them know when the assessment will be available. The email notification includes a direct link to the assessment and information such as the due date and time limit, if a due date and time limit were enabled in the assessment's settings. Before publishing, you can add text to the notification email to customize it.
By default, if the Calendar tool is included in your site, the assessment's due date will be displayed on the calendar.
Related articles:
- What is the Tests & Quizzes tool?
- Best Practices for Delivering Online Tests & Quizzes
- What types of questions can I incorporate into my assessments?
- How do I create an assessment in Tests & Quizzes?
- How do I add a new question (with the assessment builder)?
- How do I view and modify the settings of an assessment?
- How do I publish an assessment (i.e. test or quiz)?
Note: The email notification is sent immediately when publishing the assessment, but students will not be able to access the assessment via the link in the email until the assessment's available date.
Notify students when new materials are added to your site.
Drop Box
In Drop Box, you can use the Options tab to enable email notifications when files are uploaded. Allowing email notifications will give you the option to send notifications to students when you upload files to their folders. It will also give students the option to notify you when they upload files. You can choose to always send email notifications to ensure that email notifications are sent for each upload.
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Resources
When you upload files in Resources, you may send an automatic email notification to site participants to let them know that new content is available.
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Syllabus
When you add or edit a syllabus item, you may send an automatic email notification to site participants to let them know that the new syllabus is available.
Related articles:
- What is the Syllabus tool?
- How do I add a syllabus as a file attachment?
- How do I edit a syllabus item?
Send email notifications for messages and meetings.
Messages
While composing a message, you may select an option to send a copy of it to recipients' email address(es).
If you would like all messages to be sent to recipients via email, you may use the Settings tab in Messages to enable that option.
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Sign Up
When you create a new meeting in Sign Up, you have the option to send an email notifying all potential participants that they can sign up for it.
By default, attendees signed up for the meeting will receive an email reminder a day before the meeting. If the Calendar tool is included in your site, the meeting will also be published to the calendar.
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