I consider us to be ill-prepared with respect to remediation of struggling students. It feels as though, to a large extent, our message to those who have fallen off the horse is "tough luck". I think we need to do better, especially as GA walks the fine line between growing the product and compromising it by admitting students whose needs are difficult to meet as our instructional teams (and broader course infastructure) are presently constituted.
There is a need for a new role. This person (persons?) would:
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Communicate with instructional teams and identify students with a low probability of course success under its normal administration.
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Develop and administer process for locating specific problem areas.
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Work with students to remediate identified problem areas.
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Assess student progress over the duration of the process.
Intervention would ideally take several forms:
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Nighttime lectures with emphasis on fundamental skills. These would be open to all students across all cohorts, giving students the ability to supplement their own learning experience. This would be enough for low-to-moderate risk students.
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Preparation of supplemental homework (to be reviewed). I envision these more as traditional "worksheets"...the sort of homework assignments that are very repetitive (e.g. define routes for all CRUD operations for a given resource, write an AJAX request with the following options, etc). We've yet to sufficiently leverage the power of rote learning in this class.
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Weekly tutoring sessions with those most in need. These would be the sort of people with an obvious problem, the ones whom we might induce into withdrawing from the course by making them aware of the possibility for a full refund. This would be a high cost intervention, but is probably the best platform for learning about how our students think, so that we have a better chance of untangling their various misunderstandings.
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Review of homework assignments for high risk cases. Instructional teams are overburdened and do not have the resources to supply quality feedback on a regular basis. Someone else should take ownership of this.