Feedback from Sian on my 25 October abstract

Frighteningly rapid feedback from Sian on the abstract I e-mailed off earlier this afternoon. Frighteningly quick and incredibly valuable. Here's Sian's e-mail:

"This looks like a very good topic James. I like the cross-disciplinary 
aspect very much: my only concern would be that focussing on online 
programmes is going to limit the extent to which you're able to engage 
across disciplines, because multimodal assignments are still a 
relatively niche activity. I think you could afford to do this across 
online and offline modes, and then it would hopefully widen the field a 
little across the Colleges, in terms of identifying who is doing this 
kind of teaching/assessment. It would also perhaps allow you to pull in 
data from disciplines in ECA where 'crits' are standard.

I'm guessing your focus would be on teacher interviews (rather than 
student), alongside observation and visual 'reading' of assignments?

The main risk perhaps would be that people are sensitive about their 
assessment proceedures and so may be reluctant to expose too much. This 
is potentially quite a big concern. One option might be to focus on the 
MSc in E-learning and use that as an exploratory study - I know there is 
quite a bit of variation in practice across the teaching team here, 
making an evaluative interrogation of practice useful to us, and also 
providing a way in to a field where we know there is a lot of 
interesting data in the form of student work (much of it already 
accessible on the open web). The downside is that it's a single 
programme/discipline and may be over-familiar to you. Having said that, 
a manageable, small-scale project like this would do some good 
groundwork for a PhD proposal which took the wider, cross-disciplinary view.

Just initial thoughts.... lets discuss over email a bit."

This is great.

Things are looking much more positive than at 3pm this afteroon. That's some turnaround in a couple of hours. I need to build on this momentum however therefore tonight/this weekend I'm going to draft some comments in response to Sian's feedback and have them ready to send on Monday.