In this post I write about a technique I use to send personalized bulk emails to my students at the open and distance education university where I teach (the Universidad Nacional Abierta in Venezuela, or UNA, for short). Being able to mass-email students with personalized messages is should be an important issue in any distance education setup.
However, as the UNA does not provide teachers with institutional tools to perform such an outreach, we teachers are left to our own devices. I use R for all sorts of teaching and research tasks, and this was not going to be the exception. That’s how I came across an R package for sending emails called mailR, which proved to be the right tool for this task.
In what follows I will give some information of context to explain why mass-emailing would be a necessary strategy for us course facilitators to implement at the UNA. If you are only interested in how to implement this using R, you can Continue reading…
