Can Too Much Flexibility Impede Student Retention
At my school the courses are all offered numerous times throughout the year. Each 8 week session always has students who need to withdraw and then they re-enroll later. This means that I will occasionally have students from the previous instructor in my course from week 6, for example. It makes continuity difficult as an instructor.
That is not good. How do you know what the other instructor has taught them? They should have to start over. Not come in at 6-weeks.
Institutions have varying rules and procedures for drops and re-enrollments. I think, regardless of where a student may drop into your course, the current instructor should take the time to learn about the students progress, needs and expectations. An assesment should be made and a decision on how to proceed developed from that information, basically as if you were getting the student for the first time. To assume that a student should start at week one just because they had to drop out could quite possibly alienate the student from the start, and there goes the motivation, or at least a good deal of it.
Conversely, to assume a student has 6 weeks of retained and useful knowledge of the course material could be a mistake as well, hense, the assesment!!!!!
Just my opinion !!!
Hi Charles,
And a good opinion it is. You are dead on with your comments about the need to assess students for proper placement. Assumptions can be made, just as you mentioned, about what returning students know but those assumptions may not be accurate. The more we know the more support we can provide.
Gary
I have learned from these students. They come to my class after they have participated in some other instructors class and bring a fresh idea of how to get the lesson across
The nature of our course is that they may start with the module they need and not the entire course over. But, they must do all of the module they may have already done part of. Almost all students find this to be strengthening and reinforcing rather than a cumbersome, insulting waste of their time. Administration and the way the course is designed takes out most of the opportunity they might otherwise have had to complain about.
