Guide to Bulk Email Messages#
For courses on an Open edX instance, you can send bulk email messages to course participants directly from the instructor dashboard: in the LMS, select Instructor, and then select Email.
Your messages can use HTML styling, and can include links to videos, social media pages for the course, and other material. All course team members who have the Staff or Admin role can use bulk email messages to communicate with course participants before, during, and after the course run.
Learners are less likely to read and respond to email messages from courses when they receive too many of them. As a best practice, do not send more than one email message per week to course participants, unless there is good reason to do so.
Note
Some courses use third party services such as MailChimp to send bulk email. Do not use both a third party service and the Open edX bulk email service. If you use more than one service to send email message, your messages are more likely to be marked as spam, and learners might not read them.
This section contains the following topics.
Message Addressing#
When you send a bulk email message from the instructor dashboard, you choose its recipients by selecting a Send to option. You can select one or more recipient groups for each message. For details about who is included in each of the preset recipient groups, see Who Is Included in Each Recipient Group?
When you send a message to more than one recipient group, duplicate recipients are filtered out, so that someone who belongs to more than one of the recipient groups only receives one copy of the message. For example, if you address an email message to learners in a particular cohort as well as to learners in the Verified enrollment track, a learner who is in the cohort AND is in the Verified enrollment track will only receive one email message.
The following preset recipient groups are available.
Myself. Send an email message only to yourself, to test and review the message before sending it to a larger group.
Staff and Administrators. Send an email message to members of the course team who have Staff or Admin privileges. For information about course team member privileges, see Guide to Course Team Roles.
All Learners. Send an email message to all currently enrolled learners. This group does not include learners who have not activated their accounts, or who have opted out of receiving email communications. This group does not include course team members, even if they are enrolled in the course.
If you have more than one enrollment track in your course, each enrollment track is available as a separate recipient group. For more information, see Sending Email Messages to Learners in Different Enrollment Tracks.
If you have cohorts enabled in your course, each cohort is available as a separate recipient group. For more information, see Sending Email Messages to Learners in Cohorts.
Who Is Included in Each Recipient Group?#
When you send a bulk email message to one of the preset recipient groups, you should be aware of who is included in each group.
Note
It is considered good practice to only send messages to active and engaged learners. For this reason, regardless of the recipient groups selected, the Open edX platform will only send email messages to learners in a course run who have logged in within the last 18 months. This helps reduce the risk of messages being marked as spam (or bouncing) and helps ensure the continued delivery of bulk course email messages through your instance’s email providers.
Recipient Group |
Includes |
Does Not Include |
|---|---|---|
Staff and Administrators |
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All Learners |
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Sending Email Messages to Learners in Different Enrollment Tracks#
If you have more than one enrollment track in your course, each enrollment track is available as a separate recipient group. If your course includes only a single enrollment track, you will not have a track-based recipient group.
For example, if your course includes an audit track and a verified certificate track, you have two additional recipient groups: Learners in the Audit Track and Learners in the Verified Certificate Track.
Sending Email Messages to Learners in Cohorts#
If you enable cohorts in your course, each cohort is available as a separate recipient group. The recipient groups for individual cohorts only include enrolled learners who have been assigned to a cohort, whether they were automatically assigned when they accessed the course or manually assigned to a cohort by a member of the course team.
The recipient groups for cohorts do not include enrolled learners who have not been added to a cohort. This might be the case if they have not accessed the course or have not been manually added to a cohort by a member of the course team. To make sure such learners are included in email messages that are intended for all enrolled learners, select the All Learners recipient group instead of selecting all of the cohort recipient groups.
If a default cohort exists in your course, a recipient group named Cohort: Default Group is also available.
Note
The default cohort is created only if you have not created at least one automated assignment cohort in your course by the time the first learner accesses course content. If learners access the course before you have created any automated cohorts, they are automatically placed in the default cohort, to ensure that all learners in the course belong to a cohort. You can manually reassign learners from the default cohort to another cohort. For more information, see Ensuring That All Learners Are Assigned: The Default Cohort.
Managing Scheduled Email Messages#
Once a message has been scheduled it will appear in the Scheduled emails table. Each entry will describe when the message will be sent (in local time), the recipient groups selected, the subject of the message, and the author of the message.
Each scheduled email entry in this table will support the following actions:
The View button will open a modal that allows you to view the contents of this message.
The Delete button will cancel the scheduled bulk email task and the message will not be sent. This sets the bulk email task’s status to REVOKED.
The Edit button will allow you to edit the bulk email message. You will be able to adjust the recipients, subject, message contents, and/or the date and time the message should be sent.
Message Workflow States#
When you select Send Email for a message, the server begins to process a bulk email task. The server assigns a series of different workflow states to the task.
When you select Schedule Email for a message, the server creates a bulk email task and sets it to the SCHEDULED state. This task will remain in this state until it is ready to be processed.
Bulk email tasks can have the following workflow states.
Queuing: The bulk email task is created and being queued for background processing.
Pending: The task is queued and is waiting to run.
Scheduled: The task has been created and is scheduled to run at a future date and time.
Started: Background processing is in progress to create emailing subtasks.
Progress: The emailing subtasks are in progress.
Success: All emailing subtasks are complete. Note that the bulk email task can be in this state even if some or all of its emailing subtasks failed.
Failure: An error occurred and task processing did not complete successfully.
Revoked: The task was cancelled before it was processed.
While the bulk email task is in progress, you can find out what stage it has reached in the workflow by checking the Pending Tasks section on the Course Info page of the Instructor Dashboard.
When the bulk email task is complete, you can find its final state by checking the Email Task History report. For more information, see View Email Task History Report.
See also
Send an Email Message to Course Participants (how-to)
Review Sent Messages (how-to)
View Email Task History Report (how-to)
Example Messages to Learners (reference)
Guide to Composing Email Messages (reference)
Maintenance chart
Review Date |
Working Group Reviewer |
Release |
Test situation |