I am curious about what other people who manage a Listserv at a university
do with regard to supporting faculty who use lists for their courses.

Just today, we put into production a Web site combined with a script to
allow certain individuals (those in our Help Desk) to create lists
whenever a request is made for a new list. Previously, I used to handle
those requests myself through manual means. We thought about using the new
Listserv Web tool to create lists, but its not quite what we want in that
its overly complicated for our novice users and it does not provide a way
to track departmental and user information. With this new Web site, one of
our Help Desk consultants can use one of a set of designated computers to
request a list for a client and the list will be created automatically.
I also receive a report about each list created and another report that
summerizes all existing lists. Most of this stuff is written in Perl.
Eventually, we will set up an authentication mechanism so that we can let
individual users request their lists.

Anyway, the next project I want to do is to set up a way to automatically
subscribe students to the lists for any courses they sign up for that use
a Listserv list. I have some ideas on how this can be implemented within
the framework at this university, but I am wondering if anyone else who
runs a Listserv at a university has implemented such a system.

Briefly, what I want to do is have a Web site available where a list owner
can type in the name of his or her course-list, the course reference
number for the course he or she is teaching, and the instructor's e-mail
address and Listserv password then click on submit to activate this
feature. I hope to implement this by the start of our next semester this
coming January.