A response reminder is the follow-up Arist sends when a learner has a question waiting and has not answered it. It is a simple way to recover someone who stalled part way through a course. Your organization has one reminder sequence, that can be up to five reminders long, and every schedule with reminders switched on uses it.

Open Settings and choose Response reminders in the sidebar.

The heading counts your reminders, and the table lists each one across four columns, REMINDER #, HOURS SINCE LAST MESSAGE, MESSAGE TEXT, and ENABLED.

The Important line explains when Arist holds a reminder back, which section 4 covers. The Disclaimer line explains where these numbers came from.

Arist's default sequence is built from engagement and drop-off data across Arist courses, and the page singles out the first reminder, at 2 hours, as particularly effective. Changing these reminders may affect how many learners come back, so treat the defaults as a tested starting point.

The hours count from the last message the learner received, so the first reminder counts from the question and each of the others counts from the reminder before it. With the defaults in place, a learner who never answers hears from Arist 2 hours after the question, then 20 hours later, then once a day for three more days. PAUSE and RESUME are keywords a learner can send at any time, and Using System Keywords covers all of them.

This sequence is organization-wide, and whether a particular course uses it is a schedule setting. Each schedule asks Do you want to remind learners to respond to their lessons?, and a schedule with that toggle off never sends any of these reminders. See Scheduling and Delivering Courses.

Select the three-dot menu at the end of a row and choose Edit, or select the hours value itself, to open the Edit response reminder interval panel.

It holds one field, Hours since last message. Enter a whole number of hours between 1 and 48, then select Save, or Cancel to leave the timing alone.

Because every reminder after the first counts from the reminder before it, one edit moves every reminder after it. Widening reminder 2 from 20 hours to 30 pushes reminders 3, 4, and 5 ten hours later as well, so work the whole sequence out before you change a row. The table in section 1 records Arist's defaults, so write down your own starting values if you may want to return to them. The hours you save here set when each reminder becomes due, and section 4 covers the rules that decide when a due reminder goes out.

The ENABLED toggle in each row turns that reminder on or off for the whole organization. Turn one off and learners stop receiving it. One reminder always stays on, so the last enabled reminder's toggle becomes unavailable.

Arist numbers only the reminders that are enabled, so switching one off renumbers the rows after it. A sequence with three reminders on reads 1, 2, 3. The remaining reminders also close up, because each one still counts from the reminder before it, so the whole sequence finishes sooner. Check the timing again after you switch anything off.

The hours you set on this page decide when each reminder becomes due. A separate set of rules then decides when a due reminder goes out, and the page's own Important line states them. Arist defers reminders rather than sending them at awkward moments, so reminders are delayed on weekends and U.S. holidays unless those delivery days are selected, and go out at the appropriate time on the next valid day instead.

Take a learner who receives a lesson on Thursday morning and never answers it. With the defaults in place, reminder 1 comes due on Thursday afternoon and goes out then, because a weekday afternoon is already a valid time to send. Reminder 2 comes due around Saturday morning, which is not a day most courses deliver on, so it waits and reaches the learner on Monday instead.

Which days count as valid comes from the schedule the learner is enrolled on. Every schedule has a Schedule type, either Basic or Custom, and a Basic schedule also has a Cadence, either Instant or Scheduled.

The hours on this page are a target, and the schedule turns that target into a real send time. Read a schedule's type and its delivery days alongside these hours to know when a learner will hear from Arist.

The sequence also resets the moment a learner responds, so nobody is chased about a question they have already answered. A learner who replies after reminder 2 starts again at reminder 1 the next time a question goes unanswered.

Reminders follow the same timezone the course delivers in, so a reminder due in the evening is evening for the learner rather than for you. Scheduling and Delivering Courses covers how a schedule's timezone is set and which setting wins.

The MESSAGE TEXT column previews each reminder, and the tooltip beside the column header points to where the wording is edited. You change it on the System messages page, one entry per reminder and language, and this page previews the English version.

Reminder 1 shows two variants, marked Scheduled: and Instant:, because a learner on a scheduled course gets an extra line offering to change their delivery time and a learner on an instant course does not. They are two separate entries on the System messages page, so changing one leaves the other alone.

Arist's own reminder text uses two variables that get filled in per learner, %{magic_link} for the learner's enrollment management link and %{question} for the question still waiting. Keep them when you rewrite a message, because a reminder that repeats the waiting question gives the learner something to answer straight away. Managing System Messages covers the editing flow and the other variables available to you.