This is the English translation of the page Publicera studentmeddelanden
In the Student Portal, there's a feature called "student messages." These are brief notification messages visible on the logged-in student's My Page. Student messages can be published for all students in a programme or solely for a specific cohort within a programme (an offering of the programme).
Please note that all screenshots on this page feature the Student Portal set to the Swedish language. Explanatory texts in English that accompany these images should be sufficient for the instructions to make sense.
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What is a student message?
Conceptually, we see student messages as akin to a whiteboard on the door to a classroom. A place to leave brief, time-bound notices which are beneficial for everyone in the class to see. We write what fits on the board, and if new information needs to be conveyed, we erase the old message and replace it with a new one. We don't put up another whiteboard.
What does this mean for how we use student messages in the Student Portal more specifically? Firstly, only one student message per programme / programme offering can be published at a time. If we want to update or replace the message, we need to first "erase" the old message.
Unlike a real whiteboard, however, we haven't set a limit on how long a student message can be. There might be instances when a longer text or multiple messages within the same student message need to be visible. But the recommendation is to keep it concise and stick to one message at a time. If there's a need for longer or more detailed information for the students, a news article directed to the programme / programme offering could be used instead.
Who can publish student messages?
Anyone who needs to quickly post messages to students at the programme or programme offering level can be given permission to access this function. This includes, for instance, student counselors, lecturers, programme coordinators, programme administrators, etc.
Application for permission to publish
To publish student messages in the Student Portal, authorization is required and is granted by the web support team. Your immediate supervisor will notify the web support team. Your supervisor needs to provide your x-account ID, email address, and specify that you will be handling student messages.
For the support team to grant you the appropriate permissions, you must first log in to the Student Portal. You can do this by clicking 'Log in' in the header. Log in using your x-account, similar to how you log in to, for example, Canvas or the Staff Portal.
Upon your initial login, a user account is created for you in Drupal. However, the account will not have any permissions until the web support team activates them for you. You will receive an email from them once this is done.
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Handle student messages
When you have received the appropriate permissions from web support, you can begin working with student messages. To access the feature, navigate to the menu on the left-hand side. Once logged in, you will find an additional button in the menu labeled 'Student messages overview.'
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Click on this button to access the overview for student messages.
Note that the overview will be filtered to show only Swedish messages when you first reach the overview, regardless of whether or not you are currently viewing the English translation of the site. To show messages in English, choose “English” in the drop down menu under the label “Language” and hit the “Filter”-button.
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Create a new student message
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Now, let's look at how to create a new student message. In this example (note, entirely fictional), we'll create a message for medical students in their fifth semester who will be taking elective courses next term. What these medical students will eventually see on their 'My Page,' once we're done, will look like this:
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To create a new student message, click on the blue button labeled '+ Add Student Message'.
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We're presented with the following screen, and we'll now go through it field by field.
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Title
In the "Title" field, we write the headline of the student message. This will constitute the title that students see in the student message.
In the title field, therefore, we write the headline "Information about elective course."
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Body text
In the next field, labeled "Body," we write the actual message that we want the students to see.
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Programme reference / Offering reference
The next two fields determine which students will see the message on their "My Page." Here, we can choose to either add a reference to a programme or to a programme offering. However, we cannot select both simultaneously.
Program Reference – All students enrolled in the programme will see the message, regardless of whether they are in semester 1 or semester 10.
Offering Reference – Only a specific year within a programme will see the message.
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In our example, we want the message to be displayed for medical students in semester 5, which means we want to use an offering reference. Therefore, click on "Search Programme Offering."
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If instead, you want to search for a programme, press "Search Programme" and follow the same steps below. The only difference is that programmes lack offering codes and start dates since they aren't time-bound in the same way as programme offerings are. |
In the box that appears, all programme offerings at GU are listed. There are quite a lot, but fortunately, we can filter in several different ways to find the offering we're looking for. We can search by:
Offering start date
Title (of the programme)
Offering code
Programme code
or a combination of the above
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Since I'm looking for fifth-semester medical students, I have enough information to filter the list to a manageable length. Our example takes place during the autumn of 2023, meaning a student in their fifth semester started studying in autumn of 2021. I'll enter 2021 in the offering start date field and type "medical programme" in the title field. Then, I'll click on "Filter".
Note that this example if a translation of the Swedish instructions. The medical programme in English does not exist at Gothenburg University.
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Only four matches! I can immediately dismiss the Dental Programme (the term "tandläkarprogrammet" contains our search term "läkarprogrammet," which is why it also appears in the search). The remaining two matches show two instances of the Medical Programme, both starting in 2021. In the column for the offering start date, I see that one started in 2021-01, and the other started in 2021-08. Since I'm looking for the instance starting in the autumn term, I'll select the offering that started in 2021-08. I'll then click on "Select".
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The programme offering with code 1G02E has been selected. Notice that the "Search Programme" button has now been greyed out. We can no longer click on it because we can't reference a message to both an entire programme and an offering simultaneously.
Scheduling options
Student messages are intended for short, time-bound notices. For this reason, we've built the feature so that all student messages must be scheduled for unpublishing. No message should remain on students' "My Page" indefinitely.
In the scheduling options, set the date and time for when the student message will be unpublished. Ensure that the "unpublish state" is set to "Unpublished." Otherwise, you won't be able to save the message.
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Save
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The last field on the page concerns how you want to save your student message. You can choose to save the message as Published, Draft, or Unpublished. Since we are creating a new message, we choose to save it as Published. If you want to save your message but don't want students to see it yet, you can choose to save it as a draft or unpublished. For a new message, there's no difference between these two options. We'll delve deeper into the differences under the section "Editing an Existing Student Message."
Preview your student message.
When we click 'Save,' we are presented with following view.
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This is a view solely for you, the creator of the message, and will never be seen by students. For them, the message will look like this (and be located on their 'My Page'):
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We have now finished creating our student message. However, in the section titled 'Editing an Existing Student Message,' we will take a closer look at the tabs located above the heading.
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Find an existing student message
If you are trying to create a new student message, you might encounter the following error:
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Reference is already in use. |
This means that you're trying to create a student message for a programme or programme offering that already has a student message. What you need to do is find and edit that existing student message. Following our earlier analogy with the whiteboard, you simply need to locate the whiteboard and erase what's written on it to write your own message. Once you find the right student message, you'll be able to see who last published it, allowing you to make any necessary updates in consultation with the person who published the current version of the message.
To find an existing student message, we need to go back to the overview that you can find in the main menu.
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The overview offers various ways to filter and find the right student message for a specific programme or programme offering. We can combine multiple fields to narrow down our search, or use just one field to reduce the number of results in the list and then manually find the correct message. The process is similar to how we searched for a programme or programme offering when creating a new message, as discussed earlier on this page.
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We will now explore the meaning of the different fields when searching for a message. We'll use the same message we've been working with, the one intended for fifth-semester medical students.
Title
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Title is a text input field where we can type anything. Remember, we are now looking for a student message, not a programme! Here, title refers to the title of the message. If we type 'Information' or the entire title, 'Information about elective course' (or, for instance, just 'elective'), we'll find our message in the list. Use this field if you know the entire or parts of the title of the student message you're looking for.
Author
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This field can be used if you know the name of the person who last published the student message you're looking for. In our case, we can type 'Pelle' or 'Pelle Föreläsare'.
Publish date
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It might not be used frequently, but if we're looking for an older message and have an approximate idea of when it was last published, we can enter a date range to narrow down the search results.
Status
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Status refers to the publication status. There are three different statuses that a student message can have:
Draft – The current 'version' of the message is not published, but there might be an older version that is published and visible to students.
Published – The student message in its latest iteration ('version') is published.
Unpublished – The message is not published; no version of it is visible to students.
Language
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Student messages can be created in Swedish and/or English (see further up under the section 'Create a New Student Message'). Since messages are aimed at a specific group of students within a programme, it's most likely that it's published in either one language or the other, corresponding to the language the programme is given in. You can filter to see only student messages in Swedish or in English.
Programme code
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You can filter to see messages tied to a programme code exclusively. In the list, you'll also find programme offerings associated with this code. So, if you're looking for a message for a specific programme offering but only have the programme code, you can use this field to filter and find what you're looking for."
Programme title
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Here, you can search for the programme's title. You'll get both messages related to the programme and any messages for the offerings of that programme.
Programme offering code
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If you have the programme offering code for the message you want to find, you can enter it here, and you should immediately get the correct match since only one message can exist for a given programme offering.
Offering start
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Here, following our earlier example, I can enter '2021-09' to filter and display only messages linked to offerings that started in the autumn term of 2021.
Reference type
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A useful filter that filters out only messages linked to either a programme or a programme offering.
Filter and reset
When you've filled in the fields you want to use to filter the list of student messages, press the 'Filter' button to apply the filters. Once you've pressed this button, a new button labeled 'Reset' will appear next to the 'Filter' button. You can press 'Reset' at any time to reset all the filters.
Edit an existing student message
When we have found the message we want to edit in the list, there are two ways to enter the editing mode.
Via the edit button in the list
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If you click 'Edit' here, you'll arrive at the same view as when creating a new message, but certain fields will already be filled with 'old' information. Update what needs to be changed, including a new unpublishing date, and click 'Save'.
Via the edit tab in the student message preview
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"If you click on the student message title, you'll be directed to the student message preview. We looked at this earlier under 'Create a New Student Message' and saw a row of tabs above the message."
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The tab we're currently on in the preview is called 'View.' If instead, we click on 'Edit,' we'll enter the Edit mode, which is the same as mentioned above. Update what needs to be changed, including a new unpublishing date, and click 'Save'.
Translate an existing student message
Among the tabs in the image above, there's also the option of 'Translate.' We access the same function by clicking on the arrow next to 'Edit' in the overview.
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When we click on 'Translate' from either of the two buttons mentioned above, we arrive at a new page that lists the available translations and those that can be created. The Student Portal only supports two languages, Swedish and English, so these are the two listed.
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"We can see here that there's a Swedish version, which we can also edit directly from this view. Under English, however, there's no ‘Edit' button; instead, it says 'Add.' Let’s click on 'Add.'
We're now presented with a page that resembles the 'Create New/Edit' page."
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The difference is that we're creating a translation now. The 'Save' button at the bottom says 'Save (this translation),' reminding us that we're not editing the original Swedish page. If the original message had been in English, and we were creating a Swedish translation, the procedure would be exactly the same.
It's worth noting here that we don't have the option to specify a programme reference or a programme offering reference in a translation. This is because the reference is already set on the original language's page, and we can't have different references for different languages. If the was the case, we would need to create a new student message for the reference we want to use.
Erase a student message
If we want to permanently delete a student message, there are two ways to do this. The first is through the tabs we've already looked at, specifically the 'Delete' tab.
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The second method is via the arrow next to 'edit' in the overview. Click on 'Delete'.
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You'll see a confirmation dialog box to verify that you want to permanently delete the message.
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Click deleteThe content of this page has moved to Student messages .