Classrooms?

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 1:23 AM, A. Mani <a.mani.cms at gmail.com> wrote:
> In general what I find is that if classes are conducted on IRC with a
> reasonable purpose, then students all over are likely to show
> interest.
>
> Should we consider reviving classrooms by UW on IRC?

The reason we shut down the project was that it was a significant
amount of time effort to prepare, announce and present these IRC-based
events and attendance dropped off sharply after 2010. We had logs (no
idea how many read those) but most of the sessions at the end had only
1-2 people attending. It sadly wasn't worth all the effort we put in.

Ultimately we found that IRC is a high barrier for new users and most
prefer video. This was even true when we worked hard to integrate
web-based IRC clients and an entire desktop client geared around
Classroom to make things easier (a project called Lernid, now defunct,
in spite of valiant efforts by the maintainer). We never came up with
a way to make it work well for people who were new to IRC.

These days, most events have moved to video-based Ubuntu On Air (see
http://ubuntuonair.com/) and I think those have been pretty
successful.

All that said, maybe a new team will have some fresh ideas :) I
certainly won't stand in the way of another team working to revive
Classroom. The code for the bot we ran is all open source (you just
need a place to reliably host it) and the wiki page for Classroom is
editable. I can also hand off ownership of the mailing list, just be
prepared to attend to the spam queue that results once full moderation
is disabled.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2