The Announcements Activity

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  1. What is the Announcements Forum?
  2. Enable the Announcements Forum
  3. Add the Announcements Block (Latest News)
  4. Email Everyone in Your Course
  5. Delete the Announcements Block
  6. Disable the Announcements Forum & Related Functionality

The Announcements forum (previously called the News Forum) is a special forum for class announcements.

This forum is automatically created for each course and for the front page of the Moodle site. By default, it is placed in the top of the center section and only teacher, manager and administrator roles may add posts or reply to posts. The default settings force (without option for opt-out) every enrolled person to be subscribed to Announcements.

The Announcements block (called Latest News) displays can display 1-10 of recent discussions from the Announcements forum.

What is the Announcements Forum?

  • Students may NOT post or reply to the Announcements forum
  • All posts to an Announcements forum will be emailed out to all participants (as a single email or as part of a Digest based on the student’s Forum Preferences) who have access to the class at the time of posting.  (If you as a teacher didn’t get it your students didn’t get it either, if it’s hidden then students won’t get it.)
  • Posts made to announcement forums in a hidden course will NOT be emailed to students (as of Moodle 3.6), any attached files will not be accessible until the course is made available.

AS OF 2023/SU and later, the Announcements forum is no longer enabled by default but it can still be added to a class. Before 2023/SU, the Announcements forum was created by default in every Moodle course, it has been replaced with an Ask and Share here forum that students can both respond to as well as un-subscribe from.

Enable the Announcements Forum

Navigate to your course.

Use the Secondary navigation bar to go to your course’s Settings page.

Turn Editing On button is found in the top-right corner of a Moodle page you have permission to modify content for.

Scroll down to (and expand) the Appearance section.

Change the value for Number of announcements from zero to instead be anywhere between 1-10.

NOTE: in previous versions the default has been 5 and other than creating such a forum if there isn’t already one- it sets how many of the most recent posts will populate to the announcement forum-exclusive Latest News block.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Save and display button.

If you didn’t have a News or Announcements forum from previous versions of your class a new one should appear at the bottom of your Course Essentials or General section at the top of your course.

Add the Announcements Block (Latest News)

The Announcements block will display the most recent posts in the Announcements forum on the main page of your course so students can see the name of each post made from the main course view in case they haven’t checked their email recently.

Navigate to your course.

Locate the Actions menu (gear icon) from the top-right of the page.

Select the Turn Editing On option.

Turn Editing On button is found in the top-right corner of a Moodle page you have permission to modify content for.

Open the Nav drawer from the button in the top-left corner of the page.

Scroll to the bottom of the Nav drawer to Add a Block block.

From the Add.. drop-down menu select the Announcements option (they should be alphabetical)

That’s it- you’re done!

To populate this block, make a post to the Announcements forum in this course.

Email Everyone in Your Course

Any post made to an Announcements forum will be emailed out to all participants (including the instructor(s)) about 15-30 minutes (OR if they use Digest as their Forum Preference) the evening after the post has been made.

NOTE: We have a comparison of this and other ways to contact your students.

Click the Add a new topic button.

For Subject, enter the title of your post

NOTE: It doesn’t need to contain your course name – that will be included in the email subject once the post goes out.

For Message enter the body of your message, it can contain formatting, images links to files- anything a forum post normally would accept.

NOTE: Files and images hosted in Moodle will remain behind a Moodle login which may result in images appearing broken and attached files requiring students login to Moodle.

OPTIONAL: If you want to ensure this message is emailed out as fast as possible, check the Mail now checkbox at the bottom of this web form.

Click the Post to forum button.

The Announcements forum will now have a new post and the following will occur:

  • An email with this post will be sent out to all people enrolled in this course: this can take 15-45 minutes to send out.
  • If there is a Announcements block, a link to this post will be added to it.

Delete the Announcements Block

In most cases we suggest you just hide the Announcements if you don’t want to use it as you can’t create a new one without importing it from another course.

However, if you are set on deleting the Announcements forum from your class you will need to do the following.

Navigate to your course.

Locate the Actions menu (gear icon) from the top-right of the page.

Select the Turn Editing On option.

Turn Editing On button is found in the top-right corner of a Moodle page you have permission to modify content for.

Open the Nav drawer from the button in the top-left corner of the page.

Scroll to the bottom of the Nav drawer to Add a Block block.

From the Add.. drop-down menu select the Announcements option (they should be alphabetical)

That’s it- you’re done!

To populate this block, make a post to the Announcements forum in this course.

Disable the Announcements Forum & Related Functionality

Enter your Course

Delete the Announcements block

Locate the Actions menu (gear icon) from the top-right of the page.

Select the Edit Settings option.

Under Course Settings set News items to show to 0

Delete the Announcements forum from the course homepage

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