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 with 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.