The advantages of this feature are that you do not need to send out messages to your learners from your e-mail account, you can write to multiple learners at once (or only select single learners) and the learners will get a notification about your message in their e-mail inbox as well.
To send a new message to learners, go to your course and on the top bar on the left click on “Participants”. You will see an overview of all users enrolled in your course.
To select learners, you need to tick the box next to their name – however, if you want to send out a message to all enrolled learners, just tick the box on the top left (next to “First name / Surname”) and they will all be selected.
Next, open the “With selected users…” menu at the bottom and select “Send a message” from the dropdown menu. A pop-up window will open, where you can type in your message and send it out.
Note, that with this feature you cannot attach documents or format your text. Its main purpose is to give course administrators the possibility to reach out to their learners in a quick and uncomplicated way.