Messages to teachers

How to ask your course's teachers a question, link it to a problem or submission, reply in a conversation and read course announcements.

A course’s Messages (address /courses/<course>/messages) holds your conversations with the course’s teachers and the course’s announcements. In the sidebar, a dot next to Messages means you have unread messages.

Who sees your messages

Only you and the course staff see your conversations: the course’s owners, teachers and assistants, the admins of your group, and organisation and system administrators. Other students never see them.

Asking a question

You can start a question in several ways:

Messages → New message – a general question about the course;
Ask your teacher about this problem on a problem page – linked to the problem;
Ask about this result in a submission’s result – linked to the submission;
Ask about this task in an Excel upload’s result.

Enter a Subject (optional, up to 160 characters). Without one, the conversation is named after the problem or the start of your message.
Next to “About” you see the problem or submission the question is linked to. If you don’t want it linked, choose Remove.
Write your message (up to 10,000 characters).
Choose Send or press Ctrl Enter (⌘ Enter on a Mac).

Once sent, the new conversation opens. Your teachers are notified and see which problem or submission you are asking about.

Writing a message

Code. Put a code block between two lines that contain only ```, or use Insert code block. Wrap short code in a sentence with a backtick on each side, e.g. `x`.
Preview. The Preview tab shows how the message will look.
Draft. Unsent text is kept in this browser, for each conversation separately, for up to 30 days. When you come back you see “Draft restored”.

Messages are plain text – there is no other formatting.

A conversation

Select a conversation in the list to see it on the right (on a phone, on its own screen; go back with All messages):

its title and links to the linked problem or submission;
its status: “Open” or “Resolved” (with the date and who marked it);
every message, newest at the bottom;
the reply box.

Your message shows straight away with “Sending…”. If it can’t be sent, the text goes back into the box so you can try again.

A teacher marks a conversation as resolved. If you write again after that, the conversation is open again.

Opening a conversation marks it as read. Your teacher’s reply appears by itself, and a notification arrives in your inbox.

Announcements

Announcements are news from your teachers to the whole course or to some groups. They are listed under Announcements and arrive in your inbox. You can’t reply to an announcement – if you have a question, write a new message.

Keyboard

Action	Key
Next or previous conversation in the list	`J` / `K`
Send a message	`Ctrl` `Enter`