I am speaking to someone at a University, which is going through big challenges as they have decided that all first year classes will be online. They have a reputation for having a good community feel, so they are looking into possibility of trying to replicate that somewhat online, in that there can be different meeting areas, and would have visuals that would provide clues as to location. Thinking that LiveView / some kind of enhanced chat functionality might be on the right track. Anyone done something like this?
To me seems like an excellent candidate to all ecosystem provided by Elixir, Phoenix, LiveView and the Beam 
Now please keep in mind that Live View should not be used to control the DOM for pure user interaction with the page, this must be left to the client side. Just use Live View for where you need to apply business logic to the data, like when a round trip to the backend is always necessary no matter what technology is being used.
Just forget all that useless demos about games and manipulation of the DOM for any single html mutation necessary in the page, because that will just make you app sluggish in the real world. To see what I mean just try to use one of that app in a train, bus or a location with poor network 
