Examples of feedback
Feedback on a good assignment
Thank you for this second assignment. You seem to have found much of interest in this module and I do hope that the ideas you've presented here are genuinely helping to inform your work. Will you be able to use much of what you've prepared here I wonder?
This TMA was a good pass and you managed to cover all of the areas in the TMA brief to some extent. You presented a range of different ideas leading to a quite detailed specification for your MLE - do you think it's doable? What was missed at the expense of this broad coverage was the opportunity for you to explain the reasoning you had been through in arriving at your recommendations. Doing this would allow you to evidence that you have 'engaged critically with issues raised in the course' (Assignment Guide) and would also give credibility and strength to your argument if you were to use this work in your job.
What do I mean by 'critical engagement'? Let's take the example of personalisation which you raised in relation to the design of the portal for your MLE. You should explain how you reached the conclusion that personalisation is important in the design of this system (it isn't important to every system). What are the pros and cons of personalisation? How did the Adler & Rae and Castells readings in 3.5.0.3 inform your view about going for a personalised system? How did your thoughts from the readings relate to the understanding of the needs of the organisation you gained from earlier parts of this module? You were under the word limit, and the final section was largely a summary of what had gone before so I think you did have space within this TMA to tackle at least some of the issues you raised in this way. Looking forward, you'll need to demonstrate the same kind of critical engagement with the course readings in TMA03, so it's a good practice to get used to.
Your citing of academic material within the text was much improved from your first TMA, but you do need to look again at the detail of the Harvard system for formatting the references at the end of your papers. Work on a postgraduate course like this demands that you cite references accurately and in full to allow any reader to find and check the sources on which your arguments are based, and following these academic conventions will improve the presentation of your reports dramatically.
If you'd like to follow up any of my comments, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Feedback on a poor assignment
Thank you very much for your assignment. Your insider knowledge of your organisation has obviously been of benefit in approaching this task, and I hope you've enjoyed tackling it.
I found your introduction and background analysis informative and from this you seemed to be raising clear and specific issues to consider in the plan. I realise that you were asked to cover a wide range of issues in the TMA, but you seemed to lose the focus of your initial questions, which I thought was a shame. Your proposal would have been strengthened by explicitly following the argument through to explain how your proposed learning environment had emerged from consideration of the issue you started with. So for example, how does the suggestion for a searchable database of email questions relate to your issue about the lack of efficiency in replicating training - or does it? or was it not meant to?
For this course, and probably for your managers as well, the argument needs to be supported by evidence from the literature we've referred to throughout this block. The assessment criteria in the Assignment Guide are quite clear about this saying ...
"Your tutor will be looking for evidence that you have:
<snip> stated your argument clearly with supporting evidence and appropriate referencing of sources, which will include any of the electronic sources available to you as well as print and other published materials."
You didn't present any supporting evidence for your ideas, or explain how the ideas had emerged, or indeed whose they were. Don't be daunted by the literature - much of it is only published studies of the way other organisations have approached similar issues (avoiding that 're-invention' problem again!) As such the literature will give credibility to your proposals as well as providing frameworks or overarching principles to guide your decision making. You might find it helpful as you prepare the next TMA to take a chapter from the Weller or CIPD books and read it with a view to seeing how the authors use the literature to support or critique their ideas.
Also, take another look at the referencing guidelines in the Assignment Guide. You did provide some sources at the end but these hadn't been cited in the text and they weren't referenced correctly at the end.
Overall you presented a good introduction, a clearly stated argument and your proposals covered a range of issues. The way you use and reference the literature is something you will need to look carefully at for next time, and this is reflected in your mark.
Feedback on a very good assignment
This is very good assignment. It is well written, well argued and well presented - a pleasure to read - thank you.
You have presented a full and detailed specification for a course design and discussed and justified the choices you have made along the way. You have made use of the course readings to inform your design and integrated readings from previous blocks.
Overall, this TMA is fine as it stands, but if you wanted to look at some elements again, then I think in the pedagogy section it would have helped to bring your exploration of different approaches back to the course design issues. For example in your description in the text and the table of Laurillard's conversational model, you could have explained how this would be implemented in the activity/course design.
If you wanted to pursue a distinction level mark in the remaining TMA, then you would need to be showing creative and original thinking such as using your background reading to reach unexpected or novel conclusions or producing an original design.
Your referencing is nearly there - I've just made a few amendments to where you put commas and full stops when citing references in the text and suggested that you get in the habit of doing a final proof read of the formatting of your reference list at the end.
Do feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss anything further.
