Have you ever wished that you could automatically send a message to students as soon as they enroll in your course? The bCourses Welcome Email feature is designed to do exactly this! While you can send an announcement at any time, students who enroll later might miss it. The Welcome Email is designed to solve this problem.
See this article for more information on how to configure and use the bCourses Welcome Email: How do I send a welcome email to newly enrolled students with the bCourses Mailing List tool?
Background:
Before 2019, when students registered for a fully online Summer Sessions course, they received a welcome email with information about the course, class dates/timeline, etc. Sending welcome emails was managed through a manual process that included pulling reports of enrollments, identifying new registrations, and sending the email from a departmental email account, all of which required time and effort. This process worked reasonably well at small scale but did not effectively scaling to the current (and future) volume of course enrollments.
The custom-built bCourses Mailing List tool is an automated solution to streamline this process, building on its existing ability to send emails based on course enrollments. This tool has the advantage of being made available to unpublished course sites, which Canvas-native communication tools do not support (Canvas tools also only send messages to all enrolled students and cannot automate recipients based on new enrollments).