Introduction
The best way to contact students in your class is to use AsULearn’s Announcements Forum or the Quickmail block. AsULearn enrollments are synchronized with Banner, ensuring you are contacting your registered students during the volatile drop/add period when course enrollments may be changing frequently. With each of these options, a record of your communication (forum post or email) is retained in the course. Announcements leaves a student-accessible copy posted in the course. Quickmail only leaves a copy visible to the Teacher. See AsULearn Announcements Forum for more information.
Is your message time sensitive?
If your message is time sensitive, Quickmail is almost always a faster option than Announcements.
Your email may take several minutes to send if you have more than 50 users in your course. If you need your message to be delivered sooner, send it in batches of 50 users.
Using the Quickmail block
Extent of this walkthrough
Though Quickmail has many options and features you can use when sending an email to your course participants, such as scheduling a message, attaching files, and inserting a signature, this walkthrough is focused on the basic steps you need to send a simple email to your class.
1. Locate the Quickmail block on the main course page.
2. Click Compose Course Message.
3. On the next page, select and add the course participants who should (or should not) receive your email. If this message is for the whole class, select "All in course" in the To menu.
You can also send your email to course participants with a specific role, who are in a specific group, or to an individual student or students. As a reminder, when Quickmail sends your email to more than one student, it's sent BCC.
4. Enter a Subject for your message, then compose your email in the Body.
Personalize your email with user data fields!
A simple way to personalize emails sent to multiple course participants is to use data fields in the Body of your message. A data field is a placeholder that's automatically filled in by AsULearn when you send your email. For example, if you want your email to sound like it was sent directly to each student, you'd write:
Dear [:firstname:],
AsULearn will automatically replace firstname with the actual first name of the student receiving your message. Other user data fields include information about the course or student, like the name of the course, the link to the course, and the last date the student accessed the course.
5a. Click the Send Message button to send or schedule sending your message.
5b. Click the Save Draft button to save what you have composed and return to it later.
5c. Click the Cancel button to abandon your message entirely. Cancelled messages will not be saved.
The Quickmail block contains several additional options beyond sending an email.
View Drafts will display messages you have saved but not send, enabling you to Edit or Duplicate the message, then Send or Delete.
View Scheduled will display a list of scheduled messages that have not yet been sent. You can View the messages, use Send Now to send the message before its scheduled time, or use Unqueue to move a message to your Drafts.
Save writing time
Are you writing the same message multiple times? Use View to open a message, which will also display an option to Duplicate it.
View Sent Messages will display a list of all messages, scheduled and ad hoc, that you've sent through Quickmail. Use View to review a specific message and its Send Report, as well as gain option to Duplicate it.
My Signatures is an area where you can create one or more message signatures with your name and contact information to include at the bottom of messages. From the Compose Course Message page you can specify which Signature to use (or None). Signatures are associated with your AsULearn account and are not specific to a course. If you want course information in your signature, you should create separate signatures for each course, and give them course-based names.
Configuration provides settings and defaults for using Quickmail specific to your course. Your Configuration settings will be different for each course. Click the onscreen blue question marks 
for help with the settings. Click the Save preferences button to save any changes. Back will cancel your changes.