On holiday and currently without access to the interview transcripts (or at least, a desire to look through them whilst on holiday and with only small bits of time here and there for study). This is potentially a useful exercise, though: reflecting from memory on what the key themes are to have emerged from the data. Perhaps being apart for the transcripts will help me to identify the most significant themes. Here goes, then:

1. Do tutors need to retrain in order to work with multimodal assignments?
2. Have participant experiences of multimodality as students influenced their approach as tutors?
3. The time required to mark multimodal assignments (e.g. video) is greater than for traditional forms.
4. The Course Gallery, access to exemplars and presence to apparently gifted peers can inhibit experimentation.
5. Dialogue between students and tutors helps the process
6. Discussion of how tutors viewed the two assignments, look for common trends and inconsistencies and relate to the literature
   

Actually, I think this has been an interesting exercise. It's interesting that so many ideas stand out considering it's a little while since I looked at the transcripts.

Where tutors have experience multimodal assessment as a student, this has influenced their attitude towards multimodality as a tutor. And this includes digital and pre-digital multimodality. This links into another idea expressed by some within interview that tutors can usefully reorient themselves by completing multimodal assessment themselves.

Having looked over the data this morning, it feels like I should begin by offering background on the course itself. This could include information drawn from official course materials (including website), with references obviously. This could be followed - within the same first section -  by a discussion of the ways in the course is multimodal. This could be drawn from a combination of the course documentation as well as information drawn from the data.  This could include (not necessarily in this order):

• courses where a multimodal approach is encouraged (perhaps only within assessment?), and perhaps acknowledging where it is particularly so
  
• the edcmooc
  
• dissertation festival
  
• something about how multimodality informs course design
  
• something about why multimodality is encouraged, particularly in relation to assessment
  

Having provided some context I would them have different sections based around particular themes. These might be shaped around the research questions or emergent themes. Or a combination of both. In fact, it might be that emergent themes address more than one topic therefore perhaps I focus on the emergent themes and consider them in relation to the literature particularly.

Whilst I remember, one of these sections will focus on the invitation for tutors to reflect on two examples. Something like: 'As part of the interview, participants were invited to reflect on two multimodal artefacts that had been submitted for assessment within the E-Learning and Digital Cultures course. Participants were sent a link to each of the assignments, both of which were hosted on the gallery of submitted assignments for that course. The first artefact....description'

I would then go on to discuss how the different emergent themes help to address the different research questions.

This is one to run past Sian.

Off the top of my head, I think each one of the seven interviewees has talked about the "risk" of presenting work multimodally. In some instances they specifically talked about there being a perceived (and sometimes real) risk of taking a multimodal approach to high stakes assessment. And perhaps most significantly from a personal of view, there have been a few occasions where the riskiness of the multimodal dissertation has been discussed.

Hmmm. This isn't encouraging. If the tutors responsible for marking dissertation on the MSc programme are talking about it being problematic - and they were necessarily just talking about a student-based sense of trepidation - maybe I should heed the warnings. Is now the time to take risks or do I lose a bit of face and opt for a more conservative, less interesting approach?

I think a key point here - and it merits being put in bold type - is that I should only opt for multimodal dissemination if it can be realised effectively. Considering the topic of my research, it really wouldn't look good if my own dissertation failed to put into practice some of the lessons taught or learned during the exercise.