Looking to increase your students' sense of connection to you and your course? Customize your Quickmail messages!

You may have noticed that the "Compose a new message" in Quickmail interface features a bunch of data field names below the message textbox. You can copy any one of these fields into a message to personalize or customize it. In this case, I copied the first name field (including the brackets) and just pasted it into my message. You can include any of the fields provided in a message to your students. 

(And yes, it was weird to get this message addressed to me from myself!) 

Faculty using this feature report having received quick responses from their students and attribute that reaction in large part to having personalized their messages.

Note that you can go farther with this personalization by selecting additional fields.  Here's an example of other fields and the result of including them:

When this message went out, I quickly heard back from five eT/LTers where normally I might have received a reply from just one or two. It seems that this customization feature might be just the ticket for extending our engagement with our students!