> One approach I find interesting but haven't really researched is to start
> building lots of SMALL lecture halls, each of which fits N students, and
> each has the same video feed from the professor, but each small hall then
> breaks off for an independent discussion. And when it's all done, the
> highlights of each independent room could potentially be collated for
> distribution to everyone...
I actually did this for one thing once; it was a little contest I was
helping to run. Sort of like the 'Programmer of the Month' contests, but a
one-shot.
I created mailing lists for each of the teams, and one overall meta-list.
This was using Listar, so I had the cc-lists and union-lists configuration
options. cc-lists are used for outgoing mail; the subscribers of all the
cc-lists are treated as though they were subscribed to the master list with
the settings they have on the cc-list they are on. (Duplicates are
removed.) Union-lists is the same, for incoming checks such as posting
permissions.
At any rate, this contest meta-list had cc-lists and union-lists of all the
sub-lists. This meant that announcements would be posted to the meta-list
(and thus received by all teams) and if a team had an announcement or
question, they could post to the main list (since the subscriber base was a
union of all the other subscriber sets, automatically). The announcements
were automatically given to all the teams, who were responsible for keeping
their own lists up-to-date (and thus by definition, the meta-list was
automatically up-to-date), and they could discuss team-specific stuff on
their team list.
It worked fairly well. Another example of this is the listar-announce list.
In addition to allowing subscriptions, it has cc-lists to the 'listar-dev'
and 'listar-support' lists. Announcements that need to go to the entire
Listar userbase are sent to the listar-announce list (which is restricted to
only developers posting on it). Duplicates are automatically removed; no
matter which of (or how many of) the Listar lists you are on, you get only
one copy of the announcement. The Northwest C++ User's Group (nwcpp) has
nwcpp-announce and nwcpp-discuss as well.
Overall, I have found that the 'meta-list and sub-lists' architecture works
very well for a lot of things. The problem I would still love to be able to
solve effectively is a way of creating sub-lists under a meta-list on the
fly. I can see ways to do it under certain mailservers by extending the
mailing list address, but I want to find a mailserver-independent way of
doing it. Unfortunately, this isn't as easily done unless you have a way to
guarantee some information in the outgoing mail will be carried back on
replies.
--Rachel
