I'm very keen on this concept, everyone I know who has done OU courses enthuses about the value of tutorial weekends during the study phases. What we find on our existing revision courses is that some students turn up very well prepared, hardly needing anything extra before the exams, and others arrive with big question marks hanging over certain areas of the syllabus. The accelerator weekends are intended to even that up, so that students get the classroom help when they need it, which almost invariably well before the revision course at the end of the module. There has been a market for many years where freelance instructors offer private tuition to cover this gap but this is, as far as I am aware, the first time that free accelerator weekends have been offered with an ATPL course.
Obviously we don't wish to mislead, so after Keith's comments I looked at the publicity material again more carefully, and can't find anything conflicting on the website. Keith commented on the letter which we sent to our existing students which is quoted above. I think we should have said;
"We anticipate that not everyone will want to attend all the accelerator weekends so we are going to make them optional, and will include six accelerator days (three weekends if you attend the whole weekend) free with the course."
instead of:
"We anticipate that not everyone will want to attend all the accelerator weekends so we are going to make them optional, and include six accelerator days (three weekends if you attend the whole weekend) in the price of the course."
The error was mine, I didn't express myself clearly enough.
With the announcement now a few days old we are getting replies coming in from our existing students, and a fairly large number are asking to switch across to the new system, as I hoped they would. As Keith says, the three module system seems to be intrinsically better for many customers, the only question for us was how to keep the effectiveness of tuition up with only three five day revision courses. Accelerator weekends seem to be the answer.