I know there are some Macromedia Employees who read this site (John Dowdell has commented often) so I am sending this request directly to them. The University of New Orleans (UNO) went through the horrible disaster in New Orleans and will hopefully be able to start regular school again soon, but in the mean time they have decided to start internet-based classes on October tenth for students outside of the state and have given those in the state the opportunity to attend class for free at other state schools. What does this have to do with Macromedia and Breeze? UNO's internet courses are currently held via a bulletin-board type forum similar to Moogle that, in my opinion, does not work well. Students tend to treat the internet courses like normal online forums where rudeness is OK because you never see your fellow user. This ends up offending those who realize they have paid for something that is being abused by their fellow students and, in some cases, this thing is being used to abuse fellow students. I feel that converting the non-internet courses to this format will ruin the class.

Solution: If Macromedia were to donate Breeze to the University of New Orleans then the non-internet courses that are to be converted for the semester could be held via teleconference and live chat. This could encourage students to attend class at a normal time and may help adjust some attitudes. I would recommend to UNO that all students attend at least half of all Breeze-based courses live and class participation would be shown via live chatting while the professor give their lecture via web-cam from where ever they evacuated. Plus, since Breeze is Flash-based, this would be OS independent and the current issues that Mac users have with the system UNO uses could be alleviated.

Why should Macromedia or even Adobe do this? First off you would be helping out a public university from a ravaged city that probably does not have the funds to purchase this product currently. Both companies would be able to raise their 'mind-share' in a way similar to Apple's education discounts and donations. Adobe-Macromedia would be able to start their new partnership be making a huge donation that would make international newspapers in a way they could only pray for.

Why am I asking this? The first reason is purely selfish. My wife is a University of New Orleans student who has dropped internet courses in the past due to attitudes online. We use a Mac and I would love for her to have access to a system that is truly cross platform. Second, UNO is my alma-mater and I would love to see them come back from this horrible storm and I see the use of a good online course system as key to this recovery.

Thanks for your consideration. If you decide to do this please contact the UNO regents' temporary office on LSU's campus via:(225) 578-7816. For more information on the UNO situation check out their current temporary homepage via the link below.