Kommunikation mit Studierenden

For every course you offer, the eKVV automatically provides you with an electronic mailing list. A detailed description of these mailing lists can be found on the BIS wiki: Electronic mailing lists for courses

You can find the email address for your course both in the public electronic course catalogue (ekvv), on the details page for your respective course, as a link under the heading ‘Automatic electronic mailing list(s) for the course’ with the corresponding email address, and in the password-protected ‘My Courses’ section under the heading ‘Communication’.

Copy the email address, paste it into the address field of your email programme and send the email. Shortly afterwards, you will receive a confirmation email, which you must use to authorise the release of your email. When approving the email, you can choose between sending “with archiving” and “without archiving”. If you choose the archiving option, the email will be published in the course’s email archive and will therefore also be visible to students who are not enrolled on the course. This can be useful for making course information accessible to students who joined as participants after the email had been sent. You can also delete emails from the email archive at a later date (under ‘Communication: Email Archive’), but they will be automatically removed by the end of the semester at the latest.

Once you have approved it, the email will be forwarded to the students and will always reach those who are enrolled on the course at the time it is sent.

Events without participant management

If participant management is not enabled for your course, your message will be sent to all students who have added your course to their timetable and who have provided a personal email address in the electronic course catalogue (ekvv). You can see which students these are on your course’s attendance list.

Events with participant management

If participant management is enabled for your event, you have three distribution lists at your disposal:

Confirmed participants
"In": This mailing list reaches only those students who have been designated as participants via the electronic course catalogue (ekvv) participation management system. Students on the waiting list, non-participating students and students with the status ‘undefined’ are not included.

Students on the waiting list/non-participating students
“Not included”: This distribution list only reaches students who have not been allocated a place via the electronic course catalogue (ekvv) Attendance Management system (non-participating students, those on the waiting list and students with the status ‘undefined’)

Standard electronic mailing list(s)
These mailing list(s) correspond to the ones available for every course without enrolment management: they allow you to reach all students who have the course in their timetable or who have had a credit recorded for it, regardless of whether or not they were allocated a place via the enrolment management system.

Event-specific mailing lists are based on the course number for that event. If several events share the same course number (e.g. a lecture and its associated examination sessions), all participants in these events will be contacted via a single email address. If you wish to contact only the participants of one specific event, there is a separate email address for this purpose. This can be found in the details view of each event under the heading ‘Automatic mailing lists for an event’ as the ‘Alternative email address’.

 

Tutors can also be granted permission to send emails to the course mailing list. To do this, they must enter the relevant email address (under the heading ‘Communication: edit’).

Sending emails via the alias address in the list of participants

In the attendance list for your events, you will see an email icon next to the names of students who have activated an email address in the electronic course catalogue (ekvv). If you click on it, your email programme will open (alternatively, you can copy the address and paste it into your email programme) and you can send an email to the students. The address used in this process is known as an ‘alias’, a sort of pseudonym. The electronic course catalogue (ekvv) system then forwards the email to the address the students have registered in the ekvv system. If an email is sent to the alias address, no separate authorisation is required, and it can be sent from any sender address. You can also find the alias address associated with a matriculation number on the student details page, which you can access via the quick search. You can also contact guest users in this way, provided they have entered an email address in the electronic course catalogue (ekvv).

Important: Whilst the alias addresses conceal the students’ email addresses, the recipients’ names are still displayed in the email programme. Therefore, if you wish to ensure that the recipients of an email to multiple people do not know of each other’s existence, you should use the bcc function.

Sending emails using the matriculation number

As well as using alias addresses, there is an older method that works via the matriculation number. You can also contact students using an address in the format ‘matriculation number’@ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de.

Emails sent to a matriculation number can only be sent from addresses listed in the directory of staff and departments, and must be approved by the sender in each case.

If you wish to contact a group of students within your course, you have several options, depending on what you wish to achieve:

If your aim is to select and contact only those students from the attendance list who are actually attending your course, we recommend that you activate attendance management and mark the students there as ‘attending’. You can then use this selection both for sending emails (see the previous paragraph on this) and for subsequent assessment recording.

To send an email to several students at once within your course, there is a dedicated function called “Email to student group”: You’ll find this function in your course’s attendance list, which takes you to a special view of your participants. Here, on the attendance list, you select the students you wish to contact via a group email. The system will then display a button that opens the alias addresses of these students in your email programme. Please note that you can only contact around 25 students at a time in this way. If the group you are writing to is larger, you will need to send several emails.

 

At the end of the display of your participant list, where you can select groups of students, you will also find a list of all alias addresses for the participants in your course who have entered an email address in the electronic course catalogue (ekvv). This list can easily be copied and used, for example, on external evaluation platforms to send out access codes for a questionnaire relating to your course. If you have enabled attendance management for your course, you can choose whether to view only those students you have marked as attending, or all of them.

You should not use this list to contact all students on your course; the automatic distribution lists described above are much better suited for this purpose.