The following article contains features, steps, and/or screenshots that are updated for the new version of eClass that will be available June 24th, 2023. If you have questions before that time please contact IST eClass support.

eClass allows you to control if and how to notifications from any forums through subscriptions (if these have not been disabled on the forum by an instructor.)
The exception to this is each course's Announcements forum: this is a special forum that instructors commonly use for important course-related communications and are set to forced-subscription so users are unable to (nor should they try to) turn off these notifications.
Most forums are set to ‘Optional Subscription’ which gives users control over what forum notifications they receive; or to 'Automatic subscription' where the instructor feels that all students should receive notifications but has left the option available for them unsubscribe.

In-system alerts

Users receive notification alerts from many events in eClass such as new forum posts, assignments receiving (or needing) grading, messages, and badges awarded. These are highlighted with a red number in the top horizontal green nav bar when any new alerts are received.

Subscribing to entire forums where subscription is set to 'Optional' or 'Automatic'

Enter the Forum and click Subscribe to Forum to subscribe
If Unsubscribe is the option, that means you are already Subscribed to the forum.

Don't track unread posts - The Read Tracking function will automatically highlight each forum that contains new, unread posts since the last time that you logged in to eClass.
The Read Tracking function is turned on by default.
Discussion Forums that contain new posts will be displayed with the number of unread posts highlighted, indicating the number of new posts that have been added to each discussion thread.

Subscribing to topics within forums where subscription is set to Optional

Users can manually subscribe to specific forum topics by clicking on the mail icon next to the topic which toggles between two states:

• The 'Off Toggle' means you are not currently subscribed.
• The 'On Toggle' means you are currently subscribed.

Changing your Forum preferences

eClass allows you to configure a few settings relating to forum notifications. To access the available settings first go to your Profile through the dropdown menu at the top right and select Preferences:

Then go to Forum preferences:

Users can specify any of the following preferences for forums:

• Email digest type - choose to receive a single aggregated email per day containing all subscribed forum posts.
• Forum auto-subscribe - select whether making a post in an optional subscription forum should automatically subscribe you for future posts into that particular topic (ie. if anyone replies to your post).
• Forum tracking - choose whether forums should provide you alerts for when new, unread posts have been made
• When sending forum post notifications - determine whether eClass should count emailing you a copy of a post as it being read (emailed forum notifications would no longer be shown as new and unread).

Ensure you click Save changes after making any adjustments to your settings.

Global Notification Preferences

In addition to setting subscriptions for specific forums or threads, it is also possible to disable any email notifications for forums. This option is not recommended for students as it may result in missing important information but may make sense for co-instructors, administrative users, and other course enrollees to whom forum posts do not apply.

To disable forum email notifications, access your profile, then select preferences (see the steps above in changing forum preferences), then select Notification preferences:

The next page shows all of the available events that trigger alerts from eClass. Select the row for Subscribed forum posts, and set the notifications for online and offline under email to Off: