Moodle makes it easy to keep track of discussions with email notification when you are “subscribed” to a forum. This article will show you how to control notifications and keep your inbox uncluttered.

 

Manage Notifications Through Your Profile Settings

This option allows you to control your discussion forum notifications for all courses.

 

1. Click your name or user icon at the top right of your course page and select Preferences.

 

2. On the Preferences page, under User account, click Forum preferences.

 

3. On the Forum preferences page, from the Email digest type drop-down menu, select how Moodle will send notifications when you are following discussions.  You have the following options:

  • No digest (single email per forum posts) – Default
  • Complete (daily email with full posts)
  • Subjects (daily email with subjects only)
    • Note: By choosing Complete or Subjects you will receive one email per day with notifications from Moodle. If you choose No digest, you will receive an email every time a classmate or instructor posts to discussion you are following.

 

 

4. From the Forum auto-subscribe drop-down menu, select how you will follow discussion forums:

  • No: Don’t automatically subscribe me to forum discussions (Default and recommended).
  • Yes: When I post, subscribe me to that forum. (Not recommended. You will receive email notifications from any forum you contribute to.)

 

 

5. The Forum tracking section allows you to highlight the post you have not read yet, which can improve your forum navigation. We recommend that you leave these set to the default settings below.

  • Forum Tracking – Yes: highlight new posts for me
  • When sending forum post notifications – Make the post as read

 

6. At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.

 

Set up Subscription Options For a Discussion Forum as an Instructor

 

For each forum you add to a course, you can set the default subscription mode for your students and determine whether or not they will receive email notifications when someone posts or replies on that forum.

 

Unless you have a good reason to force a subscription, it is recommended that you always allow students to opt-out of receiving email notifications (the Optional Subscription mode).

 

  1. To access the subscription options for a discussion forum, open the specific forum and select the gear icon.
  2. Next, select one of the following options from the drop-down menu:
    • Optional subscription (default) – This option allows participants to choose whether to be subscribed to that particular forum. This is a recommended setting because it allows students to opt-in and to follow particular forums when they choose to.
    • Forced subscription – This option will force subscriptions for everyone. Individual students cannot override this setting.
    • Auto subscription – This option will force subscriptions for everyone but allow individuals to unsubscribe at any time.
    • Subscription disabled – to prevent anyone from subscribing to the forum.

 

Manage the Discussions You Follow

 

To change your subscription mode for a specific forum:

 

  1. Open the forum and then click the gear icon.
    1. Select Subscribe to this forum to receive emails.
    2. Select Unsubscribe to this forum, if you do not want to receive emails from the specific discussion forum .


Adapted from: https://www.umass.edu/it/support/moodle/manage-email-notifications-moodle-instructors