ORSEE3

After having created sessions and assigned participants, you probably want to invite your participants to enrol in your sessions. In order to send email invitation messages to your subjects, click on the Send invitations button in the participant part on your experiments' main page.

For every language you enabled for participants, you will have to complete the fields below. The fields are pre-filled with defaults that can be edited in Options/Email templates.

Subject: Enter the subject line of the invitation mail.

Email text: Write your invitation message. If you enter this page the first time, the default text for this type of experiment is automatically loaded and can be edited. If you change the text it will be saved to the database and will populate this field when you return to the page. To reload the original default text just empty the whole text window and click on save.

You may use variables in the text. The most important ones are the list of available sessions (#sessionlist#) and the link to the registration page (#link#). Other variables include #edit_link#, #experiment_name#, #public_experiment_note#, #ethics_by#, and #ethics_number#, as well as any participant profile form field: they are included by enclosing the mysql_column_name of that field with '#' (e.g. #fname#, #lname#, #field_of_studies#).

Below these fields for subject and body of the email message you have a number of options. One is to simply Save subject and the email text. By clicking on Mail preview the text will be saved, and you will be taken to a page displaying a good approximation of the resulting e-mail. (Participant fields are filled with dummy values, but the session list exactly the way as it would be if you sent this email right now.)

There are two options to send out e-mails. First, you can send the email only to the subjects who have not received an invitation email for this experiment before (since they were assigned to it). This should be the standard case. The second option is to send the message to all assigned subjects (except those already enrolled for sessions). This also includes the subjects who have received an e-mail for this experiment before (but have not yet signed up for a session). When sending out an inivitation email for the first time for a particular experiment, both options will lead to the same result.

Note: You should always check the email text via the preview before sending the invitation email, in order to make sure that you are not sending out an empty session list. Empty session lists (which may also result when sessions filled up very quickly) are caught by the system and these emails are discarded, but not checking may lead to you believing that emails are sent out while they are not.

The time needed for sending the e-mails depends on the system's configuration and the number of emails to send out. ORSEE uses an internal mail queue to send these e-mails. That is, the messages are not sent directly, but rather stored in the database for later delivery. A so called regular task will process the mail queue regularly (per default: every 5 minutes) and send out a defined number of e-mails each time (see section Mail queue for details).

After clicking one of the send buttons, you will be redirected to the invitation page and a message appears informing you about the number of e-mails sent and the time needed to put them into the mail queue. You can monitor the mail queue for your experiment by clicking the Monitor experiment mail queue button in the participants section of the experiment main page.

Note that you cannot send another invitation email until all invitation emails from this batch have been processed in the mail queue. After receiving the invitation email, participants can enroll for a session of your experiment as described above in section Invitations and signing up for experiments.

If the respective features are enabled in Options/General settings, you can also customize the enrollment confirmation email and the session reminder email for your experiment, vie the Customize enrollment confirmation and Customize session reminder buttons in the participants section of the experiment main page. The format is similar to editing the invitation email as described above.