Instructors and supervisors can use the Boost Dashboard’s Message Center to send time-sensitive messages to specific groups of students. These messages can serve as alerts, announcements, notifications, or reminders.

Tenant admins can enable the Message Center platform-wide or for specific institutions by turning on the “Allow instructors to send notices and messages to their learners in Boost Dashboard” feature in the Manage Features section of the Tenant Dashboard. The Message Center includes two types of messages: Banner Messages and In-App Messages.

Banner Messages appear at the top of every page of a student’s course(s) until dismissed and can be configured to appear during a specific time window. While there is no character limit on banner messages, we recommend including no more than 125 characters. Banner Messages can now be created and managed in Console. To learn more, check out our articles here.

In-App Messages appear in the student’s in-app Notification Center inbox. When a student has a new in-app message, the envelope icon in their platform header will indicate this with a red dot. Because the student must open the Notification Center to view the message, we recommend using in-app messages to communicate non-urgent information. There is no character limit on in-app messages. In-App Messages can now be created and managed in Console. To learn more, check out our articles here.

Instructors and supervisors can send out multiple banner and in-app messages to the same users at the same time. Only one banner message will appear at a time; the most recently sent message will appear first, and subsequent messages will appear after the user dismisses the first message. All in-app messages will appear in the student’s inbox. 

Opening the Message Center brings up a listing of all active banner messages (i.e. messages currently displayed to the applicable students) and all in-app messages; you can toggle between the two listings. The banner message tab includes the ID, body (the text), start date, end date, and status of all active banner messages. The in-app message tab includes the ID, title, body, and creation date of each in-app message. Note that the in-app message listing treats each iteration of the same message as a unique message; in other words, if you send the same in-app message to 150 students, that message will appear in the listing here 150 times. Selecting an in-app message from the listing will show which student received it.