How did you handle unruly students typing out of turn? (assuming there may have been unruly students. Trolls are always possible.) The possibilities for a productive online classroom are increasing, even for those persons stuck with low bandwidth. On the BeOS, we have BeShare, which is a file-sharing program (similar to Napster, but for any kind of file) but it is also a chat room where you can see who is connected at all times. It is a great community building tool because people pop in all of the time with questions, which they get answered (or at least responded to) much more quickly than they could receive responses from an e-mail discussion list. Of course, there are coding projects going on at BeShare quit often and the file-sharing aspects of BeShare help out with that quite a bit. BTW, BeShare is open source as well as the server software called MUSCLE. So far, MUSCLE servers have been compiled for the BeOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. I may start a REBOL collaboration on BeShare some day to increase the interest in REBOL. I need to brush up on my own skills first, however. -Ryan > I used to teach online during early 90's. I taught C/C++ courses > at CALC (Computer Aided Learing Center) using Genie network > (similar to AOL or Compuserve). We used Roundtable (similar to > chat room) for our classes. At one time, we had 60 students > attending one class. What a fun to see so many online at once. I > instructed them to raise their hands by sending just an > exclamation mark. That way I had a queue of students jotted > down. Each student has a chance to ask the teach. I didn't give > lectures but just answer questions students might raise during > the classes. The "lectures" were given in form of written texts. > They could download those notes weekly. I assigned them with > weekly projects. I was able to evaluate and grade their > programming skills by looking at their projects they developed > with what they learned during the course. Textbooks was used for > the classes. (I am not a tutorial writer.)
