Sending Email

Sending Email to Students

Sometimes, after you score problem sets, you may want to send your students an email discussing their scores. Other times you may want to send an email to students with general announcements about your course. This can be accomplished on the Email page, which allows you to send personalized emails. When sending mail from the email page, make sure all the fields which originally contain "FIXME" are changed. The email can be sent to all, or any subset of the students.

The personalized variables can be viewed by clicking on the "list of insertable macros" drop down menu. They are:

• $FN - first name
• $LN - last name
• $SID - student ID number
• $SECTION - student's section
• $RECITATION - student's recitation
• $STATUS - C, drop, withdrawl, audit, etc.
• $EMAIL - student's email address
• $LOGIN - student's login name
• $COL[3] - third column in merge file
• $COL[-1] - last column in merge file

Any value is accepted for $COL[ ], but values that are out of range of the merge file will produce no output.

Here is a copy of a typical email :

Dear $FN,

This email message should go to everyone in mth141 for whom I have
an email address.

NEW WEBWORK ASSIGNMENT:

A new WeBWorK assignment (assignment 8) covering the material from
this week's lectures is up on the WeBWorK system.  It must be completed
by 2:00am Tuesday, November 5.  Remember, assignment 7  must be completed
by 2:00am Tuesday, October 29.



YOUR RECENT SCORES:

Your score on WeBWorK assignment 5 was $COL[-3] points out of a
possible 15 points.  Your score on WeBWorK assignment 6 was $COL[-1]
points out of a possible 10 points. Your score on Exam 2 was $COL[-2]
points out of a possible 100 points.

These scores should include any adjustments I have made. If there are
any errors in these scores, please see me.

Have an enjoyable weekend.

Professor Pizer

Now you can send a "personalized" email to your students by merging the above with (for example) the mth141_totals.csv file (the scoring file from assignment 5). Be sure to set the merge file in the drop down menu in the upper right hand corner.

Usually you want to be really careful, so you can first preview the email by selecting some student in the drop down menu and clicking on the "Preview" button. This allows you to read the email with all the variables filled in for that student.

To save your self future work, you may want to save one email to use as a template for other emails. You can save as many as you want, but the one you save as "default" is the one that appears when you first go to the screen so that should be the template you use most often.