Conference Participation/Reduce notifications

bohanlon
Community Participant

My institution's students are distance learners, and I am working on using the Conferences feature for their webinar presentations that we'd like to be viewable for their peers. We have a course we use a student center (all our students are enrolled in that course) where we'd host these webinars/conferences. 

 

Problem:

  1. When you create a conference, you can select all users, no users, or manually select users.
  2. All users added to a conference receive a notification email. Not all students want to attend every conference. 
  3. Selecting no users means nobody can see the conference. A user might be invited in order to view the conference.
  4. Our students already receive emails from their respective advisors for their courses, and I don't want to needlessly flood their inboxes. At this point, we would have maybe 2-3 Conferences per week, but this will grow as our school body grows, and I don't want emails from us becoming spam-like. I want to keep our email communications relevant.

Potential solution:

  • I'd like to create a registration system, to invite only those who opt into webinars they want to watch, so the notification they'd receive would be expected and relevant. I know the "student appointment block" option might be one way of achieving that, but then students are still receiving emails for those newly created appointment blocks.  

Other ideas as to how I can use this Conferences feature while being mindful of the number of emails/notifications our students receive? What might I be missing?