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Thu, 4 Sep 1997 15:14:25 EDT |
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TEMPLE UNIVERSITY |
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Hello fellow List owners and Help Desk consultants:
I am writing to seek your sage wisdom on an issue which is becoming more and
more of a problem here at Temple University. I am responsible for
maintaining our L-Soft Listserver here. Listserv has become a very popular
medium for instructional purposes. We have many lists which are created
either to supplement traditional in-class discussions or to replace in-class
meetings entirely.
The vast majority of Temple's students commuters who visit campus only when
necessary although there are long-range efforts to change that. The problem
I want to discuss here is the process for finding out what each student's
e-mail address is for those students who are enrolled in a course where the
instructor uses a Listserv list. The instructors prefer to subscribe the
students to their respective lists so that the students don't need to do so.
This is done so that students can receive each message that is sent to the
list. The problem is in finding out which student has which e-mail address.
We have no centralized e-mail address database here, although we are nearing
the end of the development of such a database. This database should be in
production soon, but it will be strictly voluntary. Many of Temple's
students live outside the metropolitan calling area so they access the
Internet at their own expense through any number of private ISPs. We do not
recommend any particular ISP for students who have to pay a toll to dial into
Temple's computer network. Accounts on computers at Temple are also spread
over several different systems, most of which are DEC Alphas. Students can
opt to get a Unix shell account, with PPP service too, on any of our
centrally managed systems. The usernames can be whatever the student wants,
for the most part. Some students can also opt to get an account on their
department's system. Many of the departmental systems do not run a finger
daemon or anything like that.
Registration for courses is done via an automated voicemail system which is
not designed to record student's e-mail addresses. As such, I have
absolutely no tools for gathering this information.
Does anyone else operate course-based Listserv lists in this kind of
unstructured environment? If so, how to you deal with the problem of finding
students' e-mail addresses so that their instructors can subscribe them to
their courses' Listserv lists? With nearly 600 lists under my direct or
indirect care, this issue is getting to the point where what little sanity I
have left is rapidly fading so any and all ideas are welcome!
Stan Horwitz Internet: [log in to unmask] Bitnet: STAN@TEMPLEVM
Temple University -- Senior Consultant (My views are all mine!)
Manager of the Help-Net and Suggest lists and Listserv Postmaster.
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