Moodle has a number of features and functions to keep you and your students up-to-date with activity on your modules. This page provides an overview of these features and the remainder of pages in the guide provide you with guidance on how to use and manage notifications, messages and the digest.
Notifications alert lecturers, students and other users about events in Moodle such as new forum posts, assignments needing grading or badges awarded. Users can specify their personal preference for the output method of these notifications. Each of these notifications can be enabled or disabled independently by individual users.
Moodle has a basic instant messaging feature. You can control how you receive some of these messages in Settings for messages. If you don't check your Messages in Moodle, tell students how you prefer to be communicated with and ask them to avoid sending your messages via Moodle.
When users are subscribed to a Forum they receive an email copy of posts to their university email account.
Students and staff are required to be subscribed to News forums. You can set up other forums with subscription. While this is great feature to keep students up-to-date with module discussions, some students and staff can be overwhelmed by receiving lots of email posts.
Staff and students can set-up a daily digest for forum posts. This means that posts will be collated into one email that is received at the end of each day.
The Timeline/Module Events block displays future events in a summarised list either on your My Moodle page or a module page.
The Activity Feed block lists recent module activity, such as updated resources and activities, forum posts and assignment submissions, since the user last accessed the course. it displays on your My Moodle page and can be selected to display within a module.
Event monitoring is a feature available to users enrolled in the Pilot role in Moodle. It allows lecturers to receive notification when certain events happen in Moodle. See Events list for examples of events and their levels. To do this, a rule needs to be created for the event to be monitored and then a user, normally the lecturer or course officer will subscribe to it to be notified. The rule will specify what the event is and how often it must happen before notification is sent to the subscriber. The notification may be pop-up, email or other chosen methods.
