martin Thanks for your quick and positive reaction! I am happy about that, happy about the reflection. This is again showing how great this platform is!
I know the general problems of a course that is restricted w.r.t. number of participants for reasons of organisation or didactic or didactics or whatever. I am teaching at a university (not music... ;-) ) and I am faced with the problem, that I have between 200 and 300+ students who are interested in a specific course that I am teaching. In former times, I restricted it to 150 or 200 (handling 200 exams in a short time window is difficult...). Result: students signed in but never showed up. They blocked others. I got dozens of mails of blocked students. This was horrible for them and for me, too. The assignments were made automatically by software, I had nothing to do with it. Some went to court (succesfully) to get a place in the middle of a semester. The following year I raised the limit, but the general effect was the same. More interested people than places (and even seats in the room). And the system did not prefer people who got no place in the year before,, so there were many who had no place in 2 consecutive years while others got the place and did not show up. I tried to kick out those after 3 weeks, but this is also difficult then. Who should take those places?
Regarding tonebase courses: one might think of a request aiming at good will and community spirit: only those who are really willing to participate actively should sign up. Maybe not all know that the general stuff can be watched later (passive participation). And if one knows that (s)he has no or very limited time during the course (s)he should consider to not sign up (and in the last 2 weeks intensive course in which I participated, there was only very limited interaction by users (sending in a video, for example, as suggested or requested; this is no offense against my community friends here!), at least this was my observation and experience). BUT: I tried this in my above mentioned case. No effect. Too many students seem to be blind for this. They are either not aware of all the aspects or they are selfish. No offense. 😬 However, my clientele might be different from the clientele here. We all are interested in mastering our beloved instrument and share thoughts, videos, etc.
Uups, this was a long story now for a small message behind, sorry. I wanted to make clear that there might be no "optimal" solution for all, but I really like that you, Martin and the tonebase team, will think about a good way, even by doing "experiments".
I very much look forward to all things that are coming here. Tonebase is fantastic! Thanks to the tonebase team!