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There is a UH Manoa project underway to produce mailing lists that are automatically updated based on major.  The data will come from UH's Banner student information system, and UH Groupings will provide the framework for managing the lists. 

Overview

Here is an overview of how these academic lists are built:

Let's use Manoa Art majors pursuing a BA throughout our examples:

The desired name for this mailing list is UHM-ART-BA and it should include people who are pursuing a BA in ART. As time marches on, people should be added if they declare that they are pursuing a BA in ART, and people should be removed if they change majors, graduate or completely drop out.  This is accomplished via a two-prong approach:

  1. Create term-specific lists behind the scenes,
    1. e.g. UHM-ART-BA-201430 (201430 is the term code for Spring 2014), UHM-ART-BA-201510 (201510 is the term code for Fall 2014)
  2. Create a set of rules for making the generic UHM-ART-BA point to a term-specific list like UHM-ART-BA-201430
    1. As time marches on, these rules will automatically switch UHM-ART-BA from UHM-ART-BA-201430 to UHM-ART-BA-201510.  For example:
      1. UHM-ART-BA points to UHM-ART-BA-201430 between January 2014 and June 2014
      2. UHM-ART-BA points to UHM-ART-BA-201510 between July 2014 and December 2014
    2. Note that it is perfectly OK for people to use a term-specific list like UHM-ART-BA-2014-FALL.  As a matter of fact, it is preferable because the intent of a term-specific list is much clearer than an ambiguously generic UHM-ART-BA

Rules for creating a term-specific list

Let's use UHM-ART-BA-201430 as the desired list.   This list would be built as follows:

  • Start with all students that Banner shows as having declared intent to pursue a BA in ART on or before the desired term (201430)
    • One problem here is that Banner may not close this intent when the student graduates or drops out completely.  This could lead to picking up people who declared pursuing BA in ART several years (or decades) ago, but may have graduated or dropped out.  Switching majors usually does close the record of the previous major, but that still leaves a large amount of stale data.
  • We can reduce the number of stale majors by requiring that these majors also appear in registration activity for the term of this list (201430) AND FOR THE TERMS AFTER THAT.
  • One problem here is that we do not currently have the ability to get students who have graduated.
    • We may need to wait for a student to fail to register for the next Fall or Spring semester before we remove that student.  
      • For this 201430 list, this means that the student can be off the list if he or she has no registration activity for 201510 or beyond by the end of Fall 2014 (201510).
  • There is yet another problem: we do not currently have the ability to get students who are on approved leave.
    • A student may be on leave for as long as a whole year, so we may need to keep a student for an extra three Fall/Spring semesters, even if they do not show any registration activity:  two semesters to account for the approved leave, and the third semester to detect that they have graduated or dropped out.  QUESTION: is this acceptable?   We could have people who graduated a year and a half ago, and still be receiving mail from the list.

Rules for making a generic list point to a term-specific list

After finals week, switch generic list to point to the upcoming Fall or Spring list.  Probably easier to use some fixed dates, e.g.

  • On July 1st, make UHM-ART-BA point to the upcoming Fall list (for 7/1/2014, that would be UHM-ART-BA-201510)
  • On January 1st, make UHM-ART-BA point to the upcoming Spring list (for 1/1/2015, that would be UHM-ART-BA-201530)
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