Replying to Sian's feedback

Last night I e-mail replied to Sian in response to her feedback on my October 25/26 dissertation abstract. Here's the content of the e-mail I sent:

Hello Sian - thanks for the valuable feedback. I'm really glad you like the idea and hopefully things are now beginning to take shape.

I've given your comments some thought over the weekend and have responded to what I think were the main questions/issues you highlighted. I've responded to the different issues below. Your original comments are in quotation marks for clarity.

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"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."

Yes, I agree  about not restricting it to online programmes. In fact as I read over the abstract before sending it off, I did wonder whether limiting the scope to online learning might leave me short in terms of potential interviewees and cases to observe. What might be regarded as an alternative format assignment in some disciplines would be the norm in the likes of art and design and therefore not alternative at all, in fact.

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

Yes, I would intend to focus on staff. I felt I would be attempting to cover too much if I interviewed students and staff. 

I felt observation would provide with me with insights and understanding that might not emerge from interview data.

The visual exercise is partly at your prompting and partly because I think it will be interesting. It feels risky (in that it is a relatively unfamiliar methodology to me) but interesting at the same time.

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"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)."

It would be great to focus on MSc team. Apart from an interest point of view, from a pragmatic perspective it might be more straightforward to encourage participation compared to approaching staff from programmes where I have no standing/trust (particularly considering the sensitive nature of assessment, as you suggest). And the accessibility of work via the web might also reduce potential ethical barriers that might exist with other courses. My question here though would be whether focusing solely on the MSc would be overly narrow? I would lose the multi-disciplinary element, unless of course I carried out observation (but not interviews) within other programmes?

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"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."

Would my over-familiarity be a problem in the sense that it could be seen as reducing my effectiveness in research and analysing data? I do like the idea of 'manageable, small scale' - to me that suggests striving from critical depth over breadth, not something I've always achieved in the MSc to date.

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In summary then, the idea of focusing on the MSc in E-Learning programme is very attractive, as long as it wouldn't be seen as overly narrow or that I would be 'too close' to make meaningful observations and so on. I would really like this to be focused and manageable so that I go into critical depth. 

I hope my comments make sense. Look forward to hearing what you think in due course although I appreciate you're busy.

James