Contents and Communication

Features to manage content and communication such as external web pages, communications, and mailings

Private Messages

The “Messages” feature allow users to send each other private message through the LMS, that will be notified by email.

Enable the messages feature

The feature can be enabled and disabled, even just for some groups of users, from the “User Area LMS” configuration page

Admin > Settings > Elearning Configuration > User Area LMS

Check the User Area guide  for details

Messages will be then accessible as a button from the user panel

Send and receive messages

The system directly displays a list of the messages received by the user, it will be possible to send messages to one or multiple users.

Please note that:

To send a new message, click “Send”, select the recipients from the list and compose the message.

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Community Forums

Forma provides a global “Community Forums” feature, independent of course subscriptions, and featuring:

 

Separate forums with same features can be created also within each course, reserved to course users. Check the Course Forums guide for details

Activate Community Forums

You can activate / deactivate the community forums from the “User Area LMS” settings page:

Admin > Settings > Elearning Configuration > User Area LMS

You will be able to assign visibility over the whole community feature to:

Forums

Create a Forum

Forums can be created by platform administrators

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For each forum, you can set:

Note
private discussion threads will be only visible to the user that opened the thread and forum moderators

TIP
use the “private threads” feature to create a private support board for your users

Manage Forums

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Here you can:

Discussion threads

For each forum, you can have unlimited discussion threads and messages

 

Add a new thread

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Manage Threads

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Manage Messages

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Web Pages

Web Pages

In Forma you can manage HTML pages to be displayed either on the login page or in a dedicated tab inside the “mycourses” area.

Web pages can be added and managed from:

Admin > Contents > Web Pages

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Click on the “ADD” button to create a web page and set:

 

Title: this is the title of the webpage, and will be used also as link text in the login menu for external pages

Language: the page will be visible to users viewing the site in the selected language. If a different language is selected, the link to this page won't be displayed. 

Publish: Choose whether this page should be visible or not

Default page: this page will be used as content for the MyCourses “Home” Tab, and will be hidden on the login menu

Description: content of the page

External Web Pages

All the published web pages, unless set as default, will be automatically shown as a menu on the login page:

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Home Tab

The page selected as “default” will be used as a content for the “Home” Tab in MyCourses area, provided that Tab is active:

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 You can activate the home tab from the User Area management under:

Admin > Settings > Elearning Configuration > User Area LMS

The tab can be renamed from the standard language management area

Global Newsletter

The “Global Newsletter” feature will let you send massive emails to all or a selected group of users.

It is available under:

Admin > Contents > Newsletter

This feature is available only to platform superadministrators and administrators, and works in three basic steps:

  1. Compose your email
  2. Select the recipients
  3. Send the email

NOTE
if you need to send email only to a specific course users, check the Newsletter and Anouncement features in course management

Compose the email

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Sender: this field will be used as “reply-to” field. To avoid anti-spam and server security systems, the platform will send the emails with the default email and smtp setting.

Attachment: One or more attachments may be included in the newsletter.

Email/SMS: The communication can be sent by both e-mail and SMS. For SMS, an SMS service provider must be configured through the plugin system.

Language: choose which users should receive the email based on their profile language

 

Once you click the “SEND” button, you will be prompted to choose which users to send the communication.

Select the recipients

The system will open the user selection page, letting you select either:

Click “Save Changes” to proceed to the last step

Send the email

As a last step, the system will present the number of selected users, click “SEND” button to push your communication out.

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To avoid server anti-spam filters, the system will automatically split the massive mailing in multiple blocks of recipients, with a pause in seconds between each block.
You can configure values for blocks and pauses in advanced configuration settings