Though there are so many things one could mention, I am just going to highlight one aspect that stuck a chord with me. When reading ‘Alan’s’ remarks (Sheail, 2018) about how he envisaged flexible online courses might look, I was struck by how similar this prediction had been to my experience in supporting programmes in a previous institution.

These programmes offered a very high level of flexibility and, like ‘Alan’, the flexibility in time and space was viewed as wholly positive. Programmes like ours were thought to be offering a unique opportunity to students and flexible payment fitted with students’ changing access to financial resources. These programmes had been separated completely from the rest of the institution in terms of support. They were taught right round the year, with no breaks (so even more extreme than the third semester proposed by ‘Alan’) in order to increase flexibility.

Not surprisingly, these programmes presented an extremely complex situation compared to any other programme at the institution. There were tensions with teaching and support schedules (which didn’t fit with the institution and how people were employed). There were high amounts of admin to try to track student pathways, give advice and anticipate situations (for staff and students). The programmes had to be completely modularised to cope, which impacted hugely on programme design and teaching/assessment methods. Individual students could very often find themselves on a pathway that was unique to them but in doing so lose any of the value of being in a cohort.

The idea persisted that the maximum flexibility had to be maintained for students and no change should happen; this continued for many years.

Eventually, recognising the situation was not sustainable, the programmes were restructured from completely flexible to a ‘locked-stepped’ model. The new design lowered the amount of admin and increased the ability to anticipate student’s point in the pathway; increased students’ ability to find commonality with one another and hence increased the sense of community (they started to call themselves a cohort and talk about when they would meet on graduation day, something we hadn’t seen before). We saw a reduction in attrition, decrease in requests for study breaks mid-programme, and increase in full programme completion rates.

‘Alan’ quite rightly predicted exactly what we experienced. I suspect that no administrator was ever involved with the design of these programme, who could probably have seen the potential hazards, and why we encourage their involvement in programme design here.

You can go against the dominant ‘temporal order’ in your sector as was done here, but the consequences to those teaching/supporting needs to be thought through. This only continued because of a ‘belief’ in students needing to be offered high flexibility without really asking what they lost as a consequence of this.
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