8. Announcements, Email and the Discussion Forum
Four ways to reach your class, each suited to a different purpose:
Tool |
Use it for |
Reaches |
|---|---|---|
Announcements |
Course notices students should see when they log in |
In-app, optionally email |
Email Notices |
Direct email, including to selected people |
Email only |
Discussion Forum |
Questions and discussion |
In-app, optionally email |
Schedule |
Dates and deadlines on a calendar |
In-app |
8.1 Announcements
Where: sidebar → Interactions → Course Announcements
Click Create New, give the announcement a Title and Content, and publish.
Each announcement can be pinned (pinned ones appear in their own section above the rest), edited, or deleted.
Students see announcements on the Announcements tab and as a banner at the top of the Multimedia Book, so a pinned announcement is genuinely hard to miss.
Search by text, and filter by a From / To date range.
Whether announcements send email
⚠️ There is no per-announcement email choice. Whether an announcement emails the class is governed entirely by the course setting Emails sent to all students on every announcement (§2.7, Card 4).
Check that setting before you post. If it is on, every announcement — including a typo correction — emails the whole class.
Email sending runs in the background; the page shows live progress for in-flight announcement emails.
8.2 Email Notices
Where: sidebar → Interactions → Email Notices
Two tabs: Send Email and Email History.
Choosing recipients
The recipients table can be filtered to Total Recipients, Students, Teaching Assistants, or Instructors — the TA bucket covers STA and JTA together.
Search by name or email, page through with Load more, and use the select-all option to select everyone across all pages, not just the visible ones.
Importing a recipient list
Import Recipients takes a .csv or .xlsx file up to 5 MB. It needs a
column headed email — which, unlike the gradebook importer, may be anywhere in
the header row. CSVs must be UTF-8.
The results are grouped into:
matched — enrolled, will be added
not enrolled — on your list but not in the course
invalid emails — with row numbers
duplicates removed
Importing adds people to the recipient selection. It does not send anything. You still compose and send afterwards.
⚠️ Only the course owner can import recipients. STAs and JTAs cannot — this is narrower than most instructor permissions.
Composing
Recipients (removable chips), Subject, CC (comma-separated), and a rich-text Message.
Sending runs in the background with a live progress card, and every sent email is kept in Email History, searchable by subject or sender and filterable by date.
8.3 The Discussion Forum
Where: sidebar → Interactions → Discussion Forum
Threads can be sorted by Recent, Earlier, Popularity, Importance, or Instructor.
Creating a thread
＋ Create Thread gives you a Title, a Description, Tags, and three options:
Pin this thread to the top
Mark as important
Post anonymously — available at creation only
Moderating
The thread ⋮ menu offers Edit, Delete, Pin / Unpin, and Mark as Important / Unmark.
On comments you can delete, pin, and upvote, and replies are threaded beneath them.
⚠️ You cannot edit a student’s thread — only delete it. Attempting to edit gives “Cannot edit student’s threads, only delete is permitted”. Correct a student by replying, not by rewriting their post.
Anonymity
Students can post anonymously, and the checkbox tells them plainly that their identity is revealed to instructors and TAs.
Whether you can actually see through anonymity depends on the course setting Reveal identity of anonymous posts to Instructor/TAs (§2.7, Card 5), which is on by default.
Author role badges — INSTRUCTOR, STA, JTA — appear on staff posts, so students can tell an official answer from a peer’s.
Forum email
Like announcements, forum email is governed by a single course setting — Emails sent to all students on every post — which is on by default.
For a large or active course, turn this off. Left on, every post from every student emails the entire class, which reliably drives people to filter BodhiTree mail into a folder they never read.
8.4 Schedule
Where: sidebar → Interactions → Schedule
A drag-and-drop calendar with month, week, day, and agenda views.
Drag across a slot to create an event
Drag or resize an event to move it
Click an event to edit it
Each event has a Title, a Comment, Start Date and End Date, and — most usefully — a Chapters / Sections picker. Ticking a chapter selects all of its sections, and BodhiTree generates links to that content automatically.
Students clicking an event in their calendar get the description plus direct links into the linked material. This makes the schedule a genuine navigation aid rather than just a list of dates.
8.5 BodhiBot chat logs
Where: sidebar → Interactions → BodhiBot Chats
If BodhiBot is enabled for the course and chat logging is turned on (§2.7, Card 1), you can read students’ conversations with the chatbot here.
Both settings must be on, and logging can only be enabled after BodhiBot itself has been saved as enabled.
AI features require separately deployed services. If BodhiBot does not respond on your installation, it is not configured — check with your administrator.
Known limitations
Announcement and forum emails are all-or-nothing per course, not per post
You cannot edit student forum threads, only delete them
Both email-on-post settings default to on
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