A new semester and a new degree

The new semester for the RED, BLUE and GREEN cohorts has just begun. The Whole Course emails went out last Friday and the semester starts officially on Monday (08.02.10). In addition the new degree, eComms PS FdA, began last Monday. Our new students here are in the ORANGE cohort.
We therefore have four cohorts running and the admin of the course is becoming more complex.
One of the ways to address this complexity is that Carol and I now meet each Wednesday to review student progress and issues. We consider weekly progress reports that each tutor sends in for that week. We have devised a fairly formal process with regard to students who are falling behind and/or absent. This process takes some of the pressure off the PPD tutors. Students who we are concerned about are initially contacted by me via email. If the issue continues I will try and ring a student to discuss the issues and offer solutions and advice, such as a plan for getting back on track with their studies. Students who are continually ‘quiet’ are sent letters, each one becoming more and more serious and called by us, ‘Green’, ‘Amber’ and ‘Red’. A ‘Red’ letter is an acknowledgement that the student has effectively withdrawn from the course. The student has to make this withdrawal formal, but in the absence of any communication, we can assume a withdrawal. This process is logged and recorded on a spreadsheet.
The process is actually less straightforward than this as more phone calls and other emails will be sent and, in addition, there will also be contact from the module tutor and the PPD tutor. However, it does enable us to see clearly how each student is progressing.
For this semester we would like to use ‘text tools’, a technology that enables us to email a student but also have the message delivered to their mobile phones. Unfortunately ‘text tools’ is not available in the College at the moment, but hope it will soon be up and running again.
Last semester we tried to hold fewer meetings and also hold virtual meetings. This was not entirely successful. Tutors felt isolated and found it difficult to engage with virtual meetings. We have therefore reinstated the F2F meetings for this semester. We will, however, not be able to meet weekly; this is because some tutors would have to meet four times if they taught in each cohort and would be meeting more if they were teaching other online courses. We have, therefore, decided to meet initially every three weeks or so. We will review this situation as the semester progresses.
The validation for the eComms PS FD still needs completing. Following my submission of the Summary Document, posted here on the 6th of January 2010, I have been asked to rewrite the Validation Document to incorporate the points in the Summary Document. I was asked to do this in early January but had to tell SHU that I would be too busy to do so until the new semester had begun. We have therefore agreed that I rewrite the validation for Tuesday the 9th of February. I hope to be able to spend all day tomorrow on this rewrite.