An Overview of the Inbox & Ask-A-Question Page

Here we will look at the Instructor Inbox and Student Ask-A-Question relationship and ways to manage your Inbox communication with your classes. The Inbox tool allows for students to communicate with you regarding specific topics during the term and gives you the ability to open a two-way thread.

The Inbox tool is designed to help manage your course communication and encourage students to ask questions and engage with you outside of lecture more effectively. Some students suffer from learner apprehension and hesitate to engage in the lecture or with the instructor.

Auto-Organized - all inbox messages are funneled into the students specific course inbox. This saves wasted time spent asking for and hunting down the class, schedule and other information usually needed to identify which student is emailing you and from which course.

Auto-Categorized - the inbox receives categories with each request to help quickly sort through questions regarding various course topics.

Navigating the Inbox View

Checking for and Replying to New Messages:

• Click on any Unread (bold text) message in the inbox to bring up the conversation box.
• You can reply back to the student by entering your response and pressing the Send button.
• You can attach documents if needed by clicking on the Attachment button.
• When a student responds 

Checking for Updates on Old Messages: 

• Whenever a student responds to a message you send the thread will become bold again and the counter will increase by the number of new activities since the last time you checked.
• Opening the message thread will bring back up the conversation box.

Anonymous Message Requests:

• Occasionally students will ask questions and request to remain anonymous. This will be indicated by an Eye icon over the name.
• This is usually used in conjunction with the Widget Presentation Tool when questions come in real-time and are displayed during the lecture.
• You can always reveal the student sender by hovering over the name.

Archiving Completed Threads:

• To clean old message or remove unneeded threads you can use the Archive feature to remove the message from the inbox view.
• All Archived messages can be viewed by filtering for Archived from the drop down list.

How Students Submit Questions to the Inbox

The Ask-A-Question Submission Process in Student Applications

The Checking Inbox Process in Student Applications