From your dashboard, navigate to the Instructor View for your organization. Click on the group for which you want to enable Messages. Then, under "Services and Options" enable "Messages" by selecting one of two options: "personal only" or "personal and anonymous." The second option will allow students to choose, for each message that they send, whether they want their identity to be know to the instructor. Instructors can send replies to anonymous messages. This feature may be useful to encourage students to share their feedback and ask questions more freely. If you select "personal only," students will not be able to send anonymous messages.

Once Messages are enabled, students enrolled in your group will see a new button on their Dashboard (if they're members of multiple groups that have Messages enabled, there will be a separate button for each group). When they click on that button, they will be taken to a screen showing the full history of their conversations with their instructor (which, obviously, will be empty initially) and a button to send a new message. Encourage your students to send messages using that feature.

When a student sends a message, all instructors enrolled in the group will receive an email notification. They can unsubscribe from and resubscribe to email notifications at any time. Instructors can also view student messages by navigating to the group and then either selecting a particular student from the list, or viewing the list of most recent conversations in the box labeled "Messages." If more than one instructor is enrolled in the group, any of them can respond to a message. Until an instructor sends a response, the conversation with that student will be marked "Response needed." (If a student's message doesn't necessarily require a response, you would still need to reply something, like "Thank you for your message," for the "Response needed" alert to go away.)

If Anonymous Messages are enabled (see Step 1), students can choose to withhold their identity when sending a message. A button saying "Anonymous messages" will appear on the group page in the Instructor View. When you click on that button, you will see all anonymous messages that your students have sent. When you respond to an anonymous message, your response will be delivered to the student who sent the message and will appear in their conversation history just like a normal message. However, when you, as an instructor, view conversation history for that same student on your end, you will not see either the original message or the response. Both of these messages will remain on the "Anonymous messages" page for you and for other instructors who may be enrolled in the group.