Course Reminders

The course reminder feature allows you to create sets of rules / conditions, which, when met, automatically trigger a previously defined e-mail to a specified user group. Intervals and sending times are determined systemwide by the administrator. Regardless of that, course authors can trigger notifications at any given time. Only those users that already met the conditions/rules will receive a reminder though.

All course reminders can be viewed in the “Reminders” tab and are always editable. A notification dispatch can be triggered independently of the system sending time via the "Tools" icon. The overview contains information on the creation and modification dates, the creator as well as the number of times a reminder has already been sent. You can create a new reminder by clicking the "Add reminder" button.

The “Sent reminder log” tab provides you with a list of all reminders that have already been sent, containing information on the recipients name and send time. This view allows the author to resend reminders to single users via the "Resend" link.

Create course reminder

Reminders can be set up at any time. Click the button "Add reminder". Add the E-mail text and the E-mail subject. The description need to be added as well. It is only visible for the other and helps to get a clear and informative layout of all reminders of the course.

You can work with a total of 15 different conditions to create finely grained rule sets, specified for individual needs and requirements. This allows you e.g. to configure a number of different reminders for different user groups of the same course.

Configuration

Define the conditions needed for a reminder to be triggered. Select the kind of condition in the drop-down men, and specify the condition in the following form fields by e.g. defining a date or a score. The buttons to the right of a condition either deletes the current one or adds a new condition.

There are 6 different types of conditions: three related to the course or specific course elements, one related to course respectively group affiliation, one linked to user attributes and a date condition. You will find a short explanation concerning those six types below as well as a simple example.

a) Time span
These conditions work with duration, i.e. the time until something is going to happen or how long ago an event took place.	Example: 5 weeks befor the task assignment slot closes.
Deadline: Task assignment Initial attempt date Deadline: Task documents submission Enrollment date Initial course launch date Begin date of execution period End date of execution period Recent course launch date

b) Attempts
Assessable course elements with an attempt counter return that value to OpenOLAT, which then can be used as a condition.	Example: A test has not been (0) attempted yet.
Attempts

The two conditions "Attempts" and "Score" require operators in order to accurately display the relation states "greater than, less than, greater or equal to, less or equal to, equal" and "not equal" between two expressions or entities. Depending on the value of the expression, the return value will be either "True" or "False".

<	less than	true if a less than b	Our conditions are comparing e.g. the results of a test (a) with the value entered in the condition rule (b). If the logical return value is equal to "True", meaning that the condition was met, OpenOLAT will trigger the reminder.
<=	less or equal to	true, if a less than or equal to b
=	equal to	true if a equal to b
=>	greater or equal to	true if a greater than or equal to b
>	greater than	true if a greater than b
!=	not equal to	true if a not equal to b

An example: An author wants a reminder to be sent once a participant achieved a score of 5 or less in a test. This condition will look in the reminder function in OpenOLAT as follows:

c) Assessment
Assessable course elements with either a configured passed state or a score.	Example: The score in a checklist is less than 3 points.
Passed Score

d) Date
A deadline: a reminder will be sent as soon as possible after the recorded date.	Example: 06/24/2015 16:30

e) Affiliation
Specify which course or group members should receive the reminder.	Example: Send to all owners and coaches.
Course role Group member

f) User property
This condition also specifies the recipients. Reminders will be sent to all course members with the specified user property.	Example: All users with the zip code 8000

You can combine as many conditions as required. It would be wise to give some thoughts in advance as to who should receive a reminder under which condition. Adapting the mail body to the particular set of rules allows for creating specific e-mail reminders.

E-mail Text

The email text, which can be customized as needed, allows you to create very specific email reminders tailored to the situation.

We advise you to make use of the available variables in order to create a meaning- and helpful reminder

$firstname	The users first name
$lastname	The users last name
$fullname	The users full name, depending on the system configuration. The default style ist "lastname, firstname"
$email	The users mail address
$username	The users user name
$courseurl	The internet address of the course
$coursename	The name of the course as defined in the course info page
$coursedescription	The description of the course as defined in the course info page