Oliver and Nelson recommend that instructors planning to teach the course give weaker students the identities of the central, richly-described characters. The weaker students need more support and tend to become more confident when they start with more material. The better students can extemporize more easily and don't need as much background to get started. Starting with only a limited amount of information on each character, students add details and personality, making the mystery fresh every time it is played. Oliver and Nelson also find that there is a great deal of peer mentoring through the listserv.
Students teach each other.
If one sends a message that is full of grammatical errors, another student might reply by repeating the question in his or her answer but using a corrected version, to let the student know how to write it correctly. At the end of the course, students are required to submit multimedia presentations in which they make a case for their choice of murderer. The presentations have been quite clever, according to Oliver, including newscasts, legal briefs, and even a videotaped confession. One group of students created a town newspaper, which not only offered news, but also incorporated ads for many of the products, such as perfume, that appear in the mystery documents. Oliver and Nelson have taught more than 20 sections of the course over the past few years.