The Announcements Activity

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  1. What is the Announcements Forum?
  2. Email Everyone in Your Course
  3. Add the Announcements Block
  4. Delete the Announcements Block
  5. 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 every enrolled person to be subscribed to Announcements.

The Announcements block displays 5 recent discussions from the Announcements forum.

What is the Announcements Forum?

  • The Announcements forum is created by default in every Moodle course.
  • Students may NOT post or reply to the Announcements forum
  • All posts to an Announcements forum will be emailed out to all participants 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.

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 after the post has been made.

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.

Add the Announcements Block

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.

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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