Overview

When you have some administrative responsibilities for a group of learners, as a tutor, employer or a training provider, you will inevitably need to communicate a group message or a calendar task which applies to the whole group. This article shows how to use the collaboration facilities to accomplish both tasks and clearly save a lot of time compared to copy and pasting the same information to each individual.

Send a group message

To send a message to a group for which you are responsible:

1. Sign in to your Administrator account
2. Find and click on the Users Overview tile to show the User Group Profile page.
   
   
3. The User Group Profile page shows the basic statistics of all the users, those invited or expired and those who have had success in finding a job. In the case where all the learners were already employed, the 'got a job report' may have been removed and therefore will not show.
   
   
   The overview shows the send group message function as well as other functions and reports. 
   
   
4. You can select one or several groups (or even individual users if you have yet to create a named group with the members: clearly it is better to create the group first). To select the group(s) to which you wish to send the message:
   Click on the Group dropdown list and make your selection(s) and click the Apply button. In the example, the group Cabin Staff is selected. 
   
5. Click the checkbox to the left of a learner to select, or click Select all to select all members of the group. Click Deselect all to uncheck all members of the Group and reselect those to whom you wish to send a message.
   Click the Next button to continue.
   
   
   
6. The selected users are shown in the list; type your message in the Message box and select any file you wish to attach to the message. Click Send button.
   
   
   
7. Click Yes to confirm you wish to send the message. 
   
   
8. You then have a confirmation, so click OK to continue.
   
   
   
9. You can check if your message is working by using the Collaboration function. (See the description at the end of the next section.)

Add a Calendar message / task to a group

To add a calendar message / task to a group for which you are responsible:

1. Sign in to your Administrator account
2. Find and click on the Users Overview tile to show the User Group Profile page.
   The User Group Profile page is shown.
3. Select your group from the dropdown list and click add task to users.
   
   The Calendar task screen is shown (as a pop-up).
4. Type your message, select the date from the Calendar dropdown, the time & duration from the clock dropdowns and also the mandatory field 'Type of task' (if you do not select a type of task, a reminder in red will be shown above the dropdown list).
   
   
   The other fields which are self-explanatory can be used to provide other references, such as an administration contact, the number of days ahead of the event when a reminder notification is sent and if you are creating a series of events, you can select the repeat frequency.
5. Click the Create button to action the task and send it to your chosen group.
6. You can check if your message is working by using the Collaboration Centre function. Find and click on the Collaboration Centre tile to show the Collaboration view to show all members, or type the name of one of the participants in the search box and click on the Search button.
   
   Note If you have not used this function before, click on the How to use Collaboration link and watch the explanatory video.
   The collaboration view then shows that Robin Cook has received the message. He will also receive an email and his calendar will be updated  with the date of the next Group session. He will receive a reminder as well, two days before the event.
   
   
7. Following the event (or at the end of a series of events), the organiser can click on the Mark as Complete button. The event is archived and cannot be updated further.