It is possible that the pre-requisites of the course were inadequately expressed, but even students who meet those pre-requisites are surely not expected to automatically pass the course?
When I was at university I expected many students for each course to fail, and indeed I failed six of my eight courses in my first-year!
Certainly I had completed the pre-requisites, but I didn't do the learning on that occasion and I failed the "exit conditions" needed to receive a passing grade.
While there is some onus on the school to be responsible for teaching, there is also onus on the students to be responsible for learning. In the case of 'adult' continuing education courses I would say that as 'responsible' adults, the students should take quite a lot of the responsibility for their failure.
If you can provide access to an archive of Debian GNU/Linux then your users can regularly upgrade their installations simply through the command "apt-get dist-upgrade". This will only upgrade just those parts of Linux which they currently have installed, and can easily be set up to run from a cron entry as well. Of course if you don't have any control you probably can't enforce a particular Linux distribution either! If you can select a particular distribution though Debian is definitely worth consideration because of these powerful network update features.
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It is possible that the pre-requisites of the course were inadequately expressed, but even students who meet those pre-requisites are surely not expected to automatically pass the course?
When I was at university I expected many students for each course to fail, and indeed I failed six of my eight courses in my first-year!
Certainly I had completed the pre-requisites, but I didn't do the learning on that occasion and I failed the "exit conditions" needed to receive a passing grade.
While there is some onus on the school to be responsible for teaching, there is also onus on the students to be responsible for learning. In the case of 'adult' continuing education courses I would say that as 'responsible' adults, the students should take quite a lot of the responsibility for their failure.
If you can provide access to an archive of Debian GNU/Linux then your users can regularly upgrade their installations simply through the command "apt-get dist-upgrade". This will only upgrade just those parts of Linux which they currently have installed, and can easily be set up to run from a cron entry as well. Of course if you don't have any control you probably can't enforce a particular Linux distribution either! If you can select a particular distribution though Debian is definitely worth consideration because of these powerful network update features.