Course email options

This academic year has brought with it many changes to how you can communicate with your students through email. ITG wants to keep you informed about the choices you have for emailing the students in your courses. The types of bulk email available at Brown are detailed below. If you have any questions about which option is right for you, please contact your instructional technologist.

Course email lists set-up through ITG

With a single email address, course email lists allow you to broadcast messages to all students in your course. Registration for this list is automatically updated to match course enrollment throughout the semester. We can also add your TAs as recipients or senders of email. This email list can be set up as a broadcast list where only you can post messages (and your TAs if desired), or as a discussion list where students can also send email to everyone in the class. To request a course email list, contact your instructional technologist.

Banner email to all students registered for a course:

As an instructor, Banner allows you to email all the students on your advising page or on a class list at one time. You will see the email icons on each of these Banner pages. However, there have been some reported problems between Banner, various mail clients and browser configurations resulting in no response from Banner or client error messages. CIS is currently investigating this issue.

MyCourses email:

Each MyCourses class site can have a Mail tool activated. This allows you and your students to email each other through your course site. However, this does not send email to student addresses outside of the MyCourses site which can cause confusion. This is a tool contained within the course site and any communication through this tool remains solely within the site.

Brown Listserv

To set up an email list for a group that doesn't have to be linked to course registration, Brown has a list server tool. Listservs allow you to easily manage opt-in email lists, such as email newsletters, announcement lists and discussion groups. The disadvantage of Listserv is that the list of subscribers is not automatically updated to match course enrollment. One of the list owners has to do that manually. To find out more about this service, please visit http://listserv.brown.edu.