Every faculty member who is advising student has a “Faculty Advisor” course in Moodle, following the naming convention Faculty Advisor: Lastname, Firstname. That course is automatically populated with all of a faculty member’s advisees, based on the information in Banner. A faculty member can use the QuickMail block in that course to send an email message to all of his/her advisees, and s/he can use the Scheduler activity to help schedule appointments with those advisees.

Faculty members should see the “Faculty Advisor” course in the “Current Course List” block of the left-hand side of the main Moodle page, under Other courses. You’ll need to click on the link for that course in order to use the QuickMail block and the Scheduler.

The QuickMail block is on the left-hand side of the Faculty Advisor course page. Most likely, you’ll need to scroll down on the page to find that block. To send an email message to your advisees:

1. Click on the “Compose New Email” link.
2. Your current advisees will be listed in the Potential Recipients box on the right-hand side. If you see the “Not in a section” label next to your advisees names, it just indicates that none of your advisees have been placed in groups. To send a message to all of your advisees, click on the “Add All” button in the middle of the screen. Your advisees will then appear in the “Selected Recipients” box.
3. Scroll down in the window, and click in the Subject box. Type in a subject for your message.
4. Click in the Message box, and type your message to your advisees.
5. By default, “Receive a copy” is selected, which means that you will receive a copy of the email message that you send to your advisees. That is a good way to be sure that the message was indeed sent out. Just below that, click on the “Send Email” button to send your message to your advisees.
6. You will be taken to the History page, which will list the time the message was sent, along with the subject of the message. You can use the “Navigation” (“bread-crumb”) trail at the top of the page (particularly, the “HOME” link) to return to your main Moodle page.

The Scheduler is one of the activities that you can add to a Moodle block within the course. The Scheduler allows you to set up appointment slots for your advisees, and it allows advisees to choose among those slots in order to secure an appointment. The Scheduler also has an alert feature that emails you when a student has signed up for a slot and that can send an email reminder to the advisee at a selected time (for example, one day) before the actual appointment. You can find detailed instructions on how to use the Scheduler here. Please note that if you plan to use the Scheduler tool in your Faculty Advisor course, you need to edit the settings for the course to make the course visible to students.

Please contact itec if you have any questions about using Moodle to support your work as a faculty advisor.