One question often asked in these forums is 'Is there a way students can be notified automatically when a new file is uploaded to their course?' The short answer is that there is no quick and easy way to do this, but a good workaround is for the teacher to post in the News forum whenever they add something. All students should be subscribed to the News forum and so should receive notification of this. However.. that involves the teacher remembering to post; it's not automatic.
There is another way, using Event monitoring, available since Moodle 28. With this, students are automatically notified of all new items added to the course - not just uploaded files.
Here's how to set it up:
- Event monitoring needs to be enabled on your site from Site administration >Reports >Event monitoring rules. (The admin should check first that this won't have any detrimental effect on performance.)
- The admin must then give students the permission to subscribe to rules by going to Site administration > Users >Permissions > Student and editing the student role so that the capability tool/monitor:subscribe is set to 'Allow'. (The admin should think first about any possible consequences with enabling this.)
- The course teacher then goes to Course administration >Reports > Event monitoring rules and clicks to add a new rule.
- This rule might be called something like 'New items in History 101'. The area to monitor is 'core' and the event to monitor is 'course module created'.
- The 'Notification message' allows you create the message that the students will receive whenever a new item is added to the course. Using placeholders (click the question mark icon for suggestions ) you can phrase your message - for example:
- The student needs then to know that they have to subscribe to this 'rule' by going to the user menu top right, clicking on the Preferences page and then clicking the (new) link 'Event monitoring rules'. When they select their course, they should see the rule and be able to subscribe to it by clicking the +plus sign on the right:
- The next time the teacher adds something to the course (for example uploading a file) the student will be notified. Here's an example of an email received, showing how the notification message displays:
