Thursday, October 3, 2019

Co-Req series, 6 of 6.

The last of the posts in this series.  I wanted to give some advice for anyone going forward from this.  Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, and again, if you are new to the series, make sure to read all the posts.
Again, if you somehow missed them, make sure to read part 1, including the disclaimer, HERE and also the rest of the series.


Suggestions for you going forward

In this last post, I want to summarize some of the things we have learned, and what we would pass along to people starting on this path.  The suggestions below are in no particular order, and if they seem like “duh” things, well, sometimes time pressure makes people do funny things:

1.       Give yourself plenty of time, like three years, to do this.  If you can.
2.       Start the conversations with everyone that will be impacted by this, registration, advising, the registrar, student services, the other departments who have your courses are pre-reqs, and your marketing people to name a few.
3.       Start the conversations with faculty early.  Make sure to form committees and have people start looking around at all the different models.
4.       Contact your state governing bodies to see what is on their radar.  Co-Req is “all the rage” now, so you might have a surprise from some governing body, or maybe you can work with them to avoid surprises!
5.       Start having conversations in your department about topics and approaches (technology, calculators, common exams and/or common finals, etc) 
6.       Take the time now to think about what (and learn about what others say) are the learning objectives in your courses, and how you are meeting and measuring those.  One result from the state for Blinn is we have to measure many more things about our students.  We worked hard to make those things easy to measure.
7.       Learn from others.  Ask around, several groups from several states have done something like this, don’t re-invent the wheel.
8.       At the end of the day, this is just the next phase / fad and in a few years, something else will come along!


As always, if you have questions, comments, etc, let me know.
Twitter: @robebymathdude
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