Many instructors say that they started their first electronic discussion with a nickname and went to other forms after they had some experience with using the nickname function. They find that nicknames are more suited to one-way communication. Similar to electronic bulletin boards, newsgroups are files of postings that are accessed through a newserver computer. Newsgroups are relatively easy to use, but require that the student and teacher go outside their normal electronic mail program to use. They also are public and thus even those outside the class have access to the discussion.
Nuisance comments can result.
A list name is assigned and the instructor can subscribe the students or ask them to subscribe themselves by sending a subscription message. Once this has been accomplished all subscribers can send messages to the list name. These messages will be received in the regular mail box of the other subscribers. The instructor can either actively moderate the listserver discussion by first viewing the messages before they are sent to subscribers or can have an open list in which all postings automatically go to subscribers on the list. Listservers are a little more complicated to establish and use than nickname files, but once established, they are very convenient and they have useful functions that can be accessed, such as archiving old messages for retrieval.