Best Practice - Course that meets for half of a term then rotates

Jon Sheehan

Our school is on three trimesters. We have a year long freshman arts class that rotates to a new section every six weeks. So they end up with a course that meets in 6 “mini trimesters." I have tried different methods over the years to rotate to the new section:

• Drop the students at the mid-term and enroll them in their next section. Once grades and comments were entered, we still had a record of the student's participation in the course. This becomes labor intensive for the registrar and makes the report look disorganized.
• Keep the student sections intact, but rotate the teachers to the new section. This was OK, but didn't give us a good record of the section that students participated in (dance, music, photo, etc). It also makes calculating a final grade more challenging.

It gets further complicated because we use Canvas as our LMS and how they handle section changes and grades is a whole other story. Does anyone have a similar course and a better practice for managing these enrollment changes at the mid-term and end-of-term?