Bulk emailing all of your students in Open edX

Open edX has a really simple way of getting in touch with all of your students at once. Here’s a look at how it works:

To access the Email editor, first click on the instructor dashboard and the click the link to “Email” on the right side of the page. 

Here you will see the email editor, which closely resembles most any email editor you have likely used at some point.

Notice you only have 3 options of who will receive your message. We recommend sending yourself a copy of your message first to ensure you like how it looks. Staff and Instructors is a good option for internal message. Finally, the only people who will not receive an email when you select “All” are students who have not yet registered or who have opted out of receiving communications.

You can use keywords to make your email more personalized. Below are the enabled keywords and what they will reflect in the email.

%%USER_ID%% - The anonymous user ID of the recipient<br>

%%USER_FULLNAME%% - The full name of the message recipient<br>

%%COURSE_DISPLAY_NAME%% - The display name of the course<br>

%%COURSE_END_DATE%% - The end date of the course<br>

After you hit “Send Email,” Open edX goes through a series of steps you can see below. The speed with which Open edX completes this process is related to how big the class is. However, the process runs in the background so feel free to go about your business as it works.

After you’re done emailing, you can see a history of emails and tasks by simply clicking the buttons at the bottom of the page.