Dear online BA online students,
This year has been experimental in terms of scheduling your courses over two semesters, with two sets of courses in each semester. You have also been quite rigidly paced in your studies, as we have regulated your participation in discussion forums according to a weekly calendar (this has been done to enhance a cohort experience). The feedback from some of you has been that this schedule is quite intense, hence next week the BA Programme Board is discussing the following three motions:
- That delivery of online BA Theology modules occur over three semesters October-January, February-May, June-September, rather than two.
- That, for part-time online students there will be three entry points each year: October, February, June. Full-time online students will only be permitted to begin in October (the latter is necessary to guarantee that propaedeutic modules are taken in the correct order).
- That within semesters students be given a start and an end date, but be allowed more flexibility in their participation in the discussion forums. This is not a significant change in the cohort experience as it amounts to moving from the current 12 weeks to complete 10 units to 13 weeks. Whereas students currently have some freedom to participate in a discussion forum but within a given week (10 weeks = 10 forums with deadlines), this revision would allow them to participate within 13 weeks to all 10 forums whenever they wish. In practice this would be very similar to what takes place now as students move through the modules at the pace of about 1 unit per week (it is simply that we do not force this).
The Programme Board greatly values your input as students so could you kindly respond to this forum post with your yes/no to these motions and any comments you would like to make? Also feel free to write an email to me about this and I will represent your views in the meeting marvin.oxenham@lst.ac.uk