Getting going

Today's the day everything starts in earnest. We've been accepting a few late entries on to the course, so there's been no point in trying to fix the class list until now. As soon as you depart from conventional campus teaching, you tend to find that getting accurate information about the students is a) difficult and b) essential!

So far I've only had 5 course information sheets back, out of 23 people who've been given places on the course (the deadline was on Monday, 28th January), but this is pretty much par for the course. There isn't an 'etiquette' for how you're supposed to act as a student on a flexible course, so I'm not surprised that it's taking prospective students a while to get their heads around what to do.

We put out an internal announcement about the course for staff at Högskolan too, and I'm fairly sure that some of the new names on the list will be staff.

The forms that have come in have been well filled in, with all the information I needed. So far, the reasons why students have chosen the course are nearly all focussed on the actual content (i.e. they want to improve their oral skills in English), with just one person who also wants to 'study the phenomenon'. The sources of information about the course are evenly divided between the conventional (www.studera.nu) and personal contacts.

Two prospective students have so far declined their places, but I'm going to start calling the people on the list (when I get it later on today) to check on their intentions, and I'm expecting more people to decline then. If we end up with 10 students, I'll be well pleased. It's a small number of students for a viable course, but this is the very first time it's been run (and it hasn't been advertised), so it's a good number to have. Basically, though, we'll run the course with the people we have and sort the finances out later. We'll almost certainly market the course properly for the autumn.

The next post describes the practical steps I'm going to take today …