Terracotta Messages
Terracotta Messages allows you to send messages to your students based on criteria you set. You can differentiate messages in a variety of ways, by offering different texts to participants grouped into different conditions, through customized conditional text, and personalized merge tags.
To begin, depending on whether you have created other components already, you’ll either click “Create Message” or “Add Message.” You’ll then be guided through a series of choices in order to create your messages.
Email or Canvas Message?
How do you want your students to receive your message - in their email, or as a Canvas message? There are a few key differences (aside from where the message will arrive) that you’ll want to consider.
Canvas Conversations | |
Rich text | Plain text |
Attachments | No attachments |
Automatic “reply to” instructor. You can add other email addresses. | Students can reply only to the course instructor via the Canvas Conversations interface. |
Settings
Message settings let you determine when, how, and to which students your message(s) will be sent. These can be set at the container level (for all versions of a message), or at the treatment level (for different versions). You must set a date and time to send the message in order to save it and move to the next step.
This article addresses basic settings; for recipient selection, piped text, and conditional text, please see these articles: https://terracotta-education.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TC/pages/509378566 https://terracotta-education.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TC/pages/509444103/Selecting+Message+Recipients+and+Creating+Conditional+Text?atlOrigin=eyJpIjoiNWJmMzNjZDdjNThiNDA3YzllZjIzZGU1YzhjMDI3NDUiLCJwIjoiYyJ9
Sending a test message
If you are using email to send your message, and want to verify that it sends properly, you can do that when you’re setting up your message. Please note: Terracotta will send its test message, which will not include your text. The purpose of this message is only to verify that Terracotta is sending your messages.
Preview messages
To see how messages will look to individual students, click the arrow on the right to open the field and click students' names to see how their names will appear.
