Scheduled Sending of Mails

1 Initial Problem

Instructors and administrators face challenges in ensuring timely and consistent communication with students in the Learning Management System (LMS). Manually sending reminders, follow-ups, and announcements can be time-consuming and prone to delays. Without the ability to schedule emails, important messages may not reach students at optimal times, potentially leading to missed deadlines, decreased engagement, and reduced learning effectiveness.

2 Conceptual Summary

A scheduling feature is needed to automate communication for didactic scenarios such as assignment reminders, course updates, feedback follow-ups, and deadline notifications, improving efficiency and student support.

By implementing the possibility to schedule mails, many usecases will adressed:

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

3.2 User Interface Details

Creation of a scheduled mail

1. new Option to schedule Mails.

This option will be displayed between the Mail-content and the placeholder, to follow the creation process.

2. When selecting the checkbox the Date/Time Input Field will appear

3. After that the user can select a date and a time.

A byline will clarify the behaviour: Scheduled Mails will stay in Postbox until the time is due.

By clicking on send the confirmation info-box will clarify if the mail is (scheduled) send or saved as draft.

Outgoing Postbox and Saving as Draft

Option 'Send': scheduled Mails will be listed in new Postbox, if the User selects 'Send Mail' in the creation process and using feature 'Mail Schedule'. Landing Page is 'Outbox' with an Success Message.

The Action Menu will have options to:

• Edit
• Print

Option 'Save as Draft': If a scheduled mail is saved as draft, it will appear in the drafts. Therefore the Mail will not be sendt even if the time is due. Landing Page is 'Drafts' with an Info Message.

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

Implementing a new Folder in Mail 'Postbox'

3.4 Accessibility Implications

The Checkbox and Date/Time Picker are based on kitchensink. Therefore there are no accessibility implications to consider.

4 Additional Information

4.1 Involved Authorities

If this request is related to multiple components, please list both authorities for all related components.

4.2 Technical Aspects

Since it could be possible, that a huge amount of mails could be send (e.g. Reminder for all employees in a course for work-safety), it should be sendt via cron and not as background task. That is already the case for every existing mail sent in the cron context. The mail will be fetched when the scheduled time is due, so that the users/roles are adressed from the sending time.

4.3 Privacy

The privacy aspects do not differ between regular mails and scheduled mails. Therefore nothing changes here

4.4 Security

n.a.

4.5 Contact

Person to be contacted in case of questions about the feature or for funding offers:  Reichardt, Gabi [reichardt] or Stake, Sebastian [sstake]

4.6 Funding

Funding status and funding parties are listed in the block 'Status of Feature' in the right column of this page.

If you are interested to give funding for this feature, please get into contact with the person mentioned above as 'Contact'.

5 Discussion

6 Implementation

Feature has been implemented by {Please add related profile link of this person}

6.1 Description and Screenshots

{ Description of the final implementation and screenshots if possible. }

6.2 Test Cases

Test cases completed at {date} by {user}

6.3 Privacy

Information in privacy.md of component: updated at {date} by {user} | no change required

6.4 Approval

Approved at {date} by {user}.