How to deal with struggling students
If you have students who are not able to meet the minimum requirements for the course, what are some strategies you can use to help prepare them?
Sean,
From your experience do you feel the remediation is on the course content or based on a bigger issue like organization skills, motivation, technology skills? I have found that under some of my student's difficulty with what appears to be the course content might actually be a bigger issue that many online students struggle with.
Herbert Brown III
Great question! This topic speaks to the concepts of retention and remediation.I believe in providing students with a great deal of feedback. If a student is struggling, we should have contingency plans in place to help them learn the outcomes, and to stay on track or catch up with the rest of the course. The development of remediation type learning materials can help tremendously. However, developing this type of material can be time consuming and can become a strain on resources. A best practice I have used in the past is to identify the topics and issues a student struggles with most, and to develop remediation materials directed at those topics first.
Terry,
I guess that depends on what minimums they don't meet. If they are computer minimums, the student would have to find a computer that is sufficient (Library, somewhere). I would also encourage the department to set hard prerequisites for the courses to ensure it doesn't happen. If there are reading, writing, and math deficiencies, we have writing and math labs to help students with those problems. Our college also has a tutoring service that students can utilize for assistance when there are issues.
Herbert Brown III
