Student Choice: Not Always a Good Thing

I once worked with an institution that decreed that its online courses must be set up so that students have a choice of the order in which they take the modules in the course. All modules were required, but they had to be constructed so that none depended on students’ having gone through a prior module. When I asked about the reason for this rule, I was simply told that “students want choice; they don’t want to be told what to do.”