Hi,

My name is Wayne Liang, and I'm the Tech Chair for the student government at the medical school. I would like to set up a forum for the medical school and am trying to determine the best way to do it. Currently we have a forum set up on proboards, but it is not exactly the best solution. So I'm here to ask for help and to get ideas of what I can do.

Wish list:
* Ability for current students to post classified, talk about whatever, have discussions with faculty regarding curriculum.
* Ability for accepted students to interact with current students and each other (read housing classifieds, buy used books, ask questions). *note: accept students do not have case network IDs
* Be hosted at Case, to increase usage among med students/faculty (the single sign-on system would be great)
* To be connected somehow with Case Forum
* Privacy protection

I don't know if this is possible (I'm not a techie), but the ideal solution in my mind is if a separate space can be created within Case Forum for the medical school, e.g. forum.case.edu/casemed. Ideally there would still be separate topic areas (e.g. Discussions with faculty, classified, talk about school, incoming students section), with some requiring a Case id for access. Anonymous posts would be allowed for incoming students, but it would be preferable if the information wasn't Google searchable. The space would be somewhat separate from the general Case Forum (perhaps the link wouldn't be advertised on the main Case Forum page?), but access to the main Case Forum page would be just a click away (to encourage the med school community to participate in campus-wide topics).

So, please let me know if this is possible, or any other thoughts/suggestions. Case Med does have its own server and can possibly host its own forum, but in my mind a space within Case Forum would be ideal. Thanks.

Wayne Liang



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit was 2007:03:06:17:10:47 by Hao Liang.

Hi,

Sorry it's taken us a while to respond to this. I can create a forum for you on forum.case.edu, but there would be some limitations:

- It would only be accessible to people with Case IDs. (Accepted undergrads get Case IDs, is this not true for medical students?)

- It would be accessible to anyone with a Case ID, unless you want to manually manage the list of people who should have access. Unfortunately the software we are currently using does not allow for groups to be automatically managed based on ITS's central database of groups. However, I think we could make the forum hidden on the main Case Forum page so that medical school people would have to access it from its own URL.

- Privacy issues would be dealt with in exactly the same way as they are on forum.case.edu. You could decide whether you want to allow anonymous posting in your forum or not. The forum could be hidden from Google.

If you don't mind these limitations, email forum@case.edu and we can get the forum set up for you. If you can't live with them, your best option would probably be to find someone who can set up your own forum.