> Hi all- > I had a question about targeting appropriate enrolment for a course. I > recently taught an intermediate Python workshop (intermediate as defined by > the basics course preceding it) at my home institution. It filled within > hours, which was encouraging.
> But, day of, about 1/5 of the students were utterly unable to keep up. Two > had never opened a terminal. I had to forcefully tell one student to leave > because I couldn't spare the time to explain how lists work in Python and > why whitespace is important and he got really belligerent about it. Hey! When we hosted any workshops at my university, not just intermediate ones, after enrollment we sent out a survey. In the survey we'd assess knowledge of the applicant in terms of the pre-reqs we've assumed they have and information we were considering covering. That gave us the basic information on what page everyone was at. We then catered the workshop to the page the majority was on and sent emails out to enrollers who were a bit behind that and a bit ahead that informed them what the workshop would cover. Additionally, if there were other workshops going on that we thought would be more at their level, (or if I could find any resources at that level) we'd direct them to there. Additionally, we had an extra just-in-case volunteer TA, who was there to spend time with students who were at a different level if they did end up deciding to come. I think differing skill set will always be an issue and that it's hard to tell someone who has already made the commitment of attending and attended to leave. It's a bit embarrassing, I think, for both parties. In lecturing type workshops it's a lot harder to handle, but for hands-on workshops having a TA and other just-in-case exercises on hand helped. They were already aware because of the previous email what the head instructor's focus would be on. I hope this helps! -- Anja
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