Allowing Email Subscriptions in Discussion Forums

Students may be permitted to either subscribe to an entire forum or to specific threads within a forum. When email subscription is enabled, Blackboard sends out email alerts whenever a new post or a reply to an existing post occurred. The instructor decides whether to have the subscription email contain the text of the post/reply or a link to the post/reply. (NOTE: Individuals decide for themselves when they want to subscribe to a forum or thread. Subscribing does not impact other users in the forum.)

Subscriptions to forums or threads can be enabled either when the forum is first created or when editing [changing] the forum settings.

Locate the Discussion Forums in your Course.
Click the forum’s Action Link to access the contextual menu.
Select Edit.
On the Edit Forum page, scroll down to view the Subscribe options under Forum Settings.
Choose the appropriate subscription settings.

Subscribe Options:
- Allow members to subscribe to threads – restricts subscription to specific threads within the forum. (NOTE: Threads are first-column posts.)
- Allow members to subscribe to forum – allows subscription to all threads within the forum.
- Include body of post in the email – includes the actual text posted to the forum in the email notification, as well as, a link to the post/reply.
- Include link to post – will add a link to the post/reply in the email notification. (NOTE: When a student clicks the link, they are taken directly to the discussion post. If the actual text were included in the email, the learner could easily reply directly to the poster, bypassing the discussion entirely.)
Click Submit to save your changes.

Information about forwarding Blackboard notifications to a UMass email from the student perspective can be found on the Connecting Blackboard Notifications to UMass Email Student Orientation and Resource page. Please share this resource with your students.