Instant messaging

Sending individual messages to course participants
Previously, a message sent to a course was automatically a group message and every reply was sent to all course participants. Teachers can now choose to send individual messages or start a group conversation.

To tidy things up a bit, a message to a large group of people now only creates one thread in your messages.

Students can no longer send a new message to a course, but they can reply in a group course conversation initiated by a teacher. All existing course conversations will be closed, but teachers can reopen closed messages.

Selecting recipients from a hierarchy
The option that selects recipients from a hierarchy is back. Clicking the search icon next to the recipient field brings up the recipient selector. Like before, the maximum number of recipients is 300 (this number may change).

‘Enter’ now means line break instead of ‘Send’
After feedback from many teachers, we have decided to let ‘Enter’ insert a line break instead of sending the message.

Bulletins

We’ve improved how different content is presented in the bulletins, making it easier to distinguish between types of content.

Coming soon in bulletins

We know that many of you miss the possibility to embed resources and images in bulletins, as well as scheduling of posts.

In the near future we plan to offer the following enhancements to the bulletins:

• Support for linking and embedding images and resources, such as assignments or files in a bulletin, similar to the ‘Tree link’ function.
• Scheduling of posts. This lets you decide when a post will appear for students.

If you’re interested in our long-term plans for all areas of itslearning, please see our roadmap at: http://www.itslearning.eu/roadmap