Is there any way, either as an administrator or as an instructor, to set all the users or all the students in a course so that their email in WebCT 8.0.4 will forward to an external email address. We have loaded each user's email address on account creation but it seems like the forwarding option can only be set by each user individually??
Hi Kathy,
There is no administrative option for enabling email forwarding in a user's profile on Blackboard Vista/Campus Edition 8.0.x. It is strictly an "opt-in" option by the user, both students and faculty.
Cheers,
Bob
Kathy In addition to Dr C Bob's comment I will add that I usually discourage mail forwarding. This is because the user cannot successfully reply to the forwarded email from their external mail client. Even though there is a message not to reply, many do as they are in a hurry and it looks like a "normal" email for the most part. This reply then ends up lost in cyberland and never reaches the intended recipient. Another reason is that by keeping the mail internal to Blackboard, it keeps all your section correspondence organized and contained if there is ever a need to review for any reason. Hope this helps Harold
Kathy
In addition to Dr C Bob's comment I will add that I usually discourage mail forwarding. This is because the user cannot successfully reply to the forwarded email from their external mail client. Even though there is a message not to reply, many do as they are in a hurry and it looks like a "normal" email for the most part. This reply then ends up lost in cyberland and never reaches the intended recipient.
Another reason is that by keeping the mail internal to Blackboard, it keeps all your section correspondence organized and contained if there is ever a need to review for any reason.
Hope this helps
Harold
Thank you Harold and Bob!
We never populated the email address until this year. There was a hope that we could get messages out to students even if they were not logged into WebCT. One problem was that we couldn't mass set the forwarding option and the other was that the email would look like it came from "administrator" or from "system" which led students to ignore it even if it was forwarded.
I understand the inconvenience of not being able to reply, but we were hoping that it could be a broadcase type of message out to where they would actually see it immediately. You would have a record of it being sent in WebCT.
Thanks for your help.
Not wanting to sound like a sales pitch but you may want to speak to your Blackboard Rep about BB's Connect product line. We use it here in Georgia at a number of our institutions and it works great to broadcast communications to endusers using email and text to their moble devices. It is used primarily for emergency notifications.