Email in Brightspace courses

About this article

This article includes an overview of the Brightspace Email Tool and links to additional articles related to sending email in Brightspace courses. It is intended for instructors.

Overivew

Brightspace includes a simple email messaging tool that allows instructors to compose and send messages to individual students, sections, groups, and the entire classlist. These messages are sent to students' WSU email addresses. Brightspace does not receive email. If students reply to messages sent from Brightspace, the reply is sent to the instructor's WSU email mailbox.

Brightspace versus Outlook

Although instructors can certainly email their students using Microsoft Outlook, our campus email system, they would need to create distribution lists manually to send messages to the entire class or to specific groups of students. Classlists and student email address are uploaded to Brightspace automatically and any groups created in Brightspace courses for other purposes (e.g., project teams) can be selected as email recipients in the Brightspace email tool. This may save instructors some time.

Classes With More Than 50 Students

In earlier versions of Brightspace, many instructors sent email to students through the Brightspace Classlist tool. Although this still works in the current version, sending messages using the Email Tool is recommended, especially in classes of more than 50 students. Brightspace now limits the number of email addresses that can be added to the TO: field of an email message to 50. In classes with more than 50 students, instructors can still send messages to the entire classlist by adding the email addresses to the BCC: field instead of the TO: field. This is much easier to do when using the Email Tool.

Instructions

Option 1: Using the Email Tool

1. Under Communication, select Email.
2. Add the addressees to the To field. This can be done by either
   • typing in the email addresses of each recipient or
   • clicking on the Address Book button at the top right of the window and selecting the addressees from the list.
     • You can select individuals from the list by clicking the checkboxes to the left of their names.
     • You can select the entire class by clicking the checkbox next to the To Cc Bcc just below the Search field in the window. One word of caution: clicking the checkbox to select all students will only select the addressees that are listed in the window. If there are more students that what appear in the list, change the number displayed per page at the right side of the window to be large enough to include all students.
3. Enter the Subject and content in the Body of the message.
4. Add any attachments to the message. Attachments can be found in the bottom left corner of the screen. Attachments can be in the form of uploaded files or audio recordings.
5. Click Send in the top left corner of the window.

• Emailing through the Classlist Tool
• Emailing through the Email tool