Exploring student perceptions of assessment feedback

Abstrac

Cats and dogs and pheromones: researching the student experience

Pheromone Therapy is a unique online course pioneered by the University of Lincoln and delivered through the university's virtual learning environment. The course adopted innovative practices such as induction activities designed to embed the skills required for successful online learning, a range of interactions with content and focus on opportunities for socialisation including ‘café’ forums and a student gallery. Retention is a key issue with distance delivery (Simpson, 2003) but listening to the student voice is only a comparatively recent initiative. Past studies have focussed on non-completion (Yorke & Longden, 2008) or the student experience on campus (JISC, 2007). Pheromone Therapy was an opportunity to capture data about distance learner’s experience of learning in isolation and collect individual responses to the course design. Findings provided a rich source of information for the construction and delivery of online courses in the future. Social aspects of learning online have been suggested as prime motivators in building a sense of collegiality. Pheromone Therapy was designed to include opportunities for social interaction but students demonstrated how the learning experiences which were situated in practice, with opportunities for shared participation, created the greatest cohesion and sense of community

Creative analysis of NSS data and collaborative research to inform good practice in assessment feedback

Funded by the Subject Centre for Social Policy and Social Work (SWAP), this research project sought to identify student and academic staff perspectives as to what constitutes effective assessment feedback practice. It was, in part, a subject level exploration in response to the fact that assessment feedback has consistently emerged as an area of concern to students completing National Student Satisfaction Surveys. Using mixed research methods, including drawing on data from the 2009 National Student Survey, the research was undertaken across SWAP constituency subject-areas in three universities. Whilst supportive of previous research reports (for example, Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick 2004, McDowell 2008, McDowell and Sambell 1999, Crook et al 2006), findings from this project particularly highlight the central significance to students of the quality of their relationships with staff. Indeed, other generic factors that are often argued to impact on assessment feedback such as timeliness and consistency appear to be contingent on the quality of staff-student relationships within specific departmental context

Book reviews

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Advanced heat receiver conceptual design study

Solar Dynamic space power systems are candidate electrical power generating systems for future NASA missions. One of the key components of the solar dynamic power system is the solar receiver/thermal energy storage (TES) subsystem. Receiver development was conducted by NASA in the late 1960's and since then a very limited amount of work has been done in this area. Consequently the state of the art (SOA) receivers designed for the IOC space station are large and massive. The objective of the Advanced Heat Receiver Conceptual Design Study is to conceive and analyze advanced high temperature solar dynamic Brayton and Stirling receivers. The goal is to generate innovative receiver concepts that are half of the mass, smaller, and more efficient than the SOA. It is also necessary that these innovative receivers offer ease of manufacturing, less structural complexity and fewer thermal stress problems. Advanced Brayton and Stirling receiver storage units are proposed and analyzed in this study which can potentially meet these goals

Requiring Certain Physical Enhancements For Internet Courses: A Survey

Use of the Internet continues to increase and new technology provides more and better communication options.  A questionnaire was distributed to chairpersons of accounting departments to obtain their views on requiring some of these newer physical enhancements on a student’s computers when they register for an E course.  Respondents strongly favored requiring students to provide a digital photo ID and audio capabilities when registering for an E course but rejected the idea of requiring them to provide a web cam that might be used for verifying their identity.  They also tended to believe, even though they did not endorse requiring one, students should use a web cam when completing examinations on-line and that faculty should compare the photo ID with the web cam image.  However, they do not believe that students should be required to use a web cam when completing homework assignments or that faculty should compare the photo ID with the web cam image.  Overall accounting chairs endorse requiring the student who enrolls in an E course to obtain some existing technology and they expect the student to be prepared to spend more than $100 to obtain the technology

Re-Imagining the Idea of the University for a Post-Capitalist Society

This thesis critically examines the practical and theoretical significance of autonomous learning spaces that have experimented with alternative forms of no-fee, higher education provision in the United Kingdom (UK). This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by: (i) documenting and critically examining the importance of these autonomous spaces in a way that can inspire and support others involved in similar projects now, or in the future; (ii) grounding them within an Libertarian-Marxist theoretical framework that highlights their potential to prefigure alternative models of higher education provision and self-organisation to crack or rupture capitalist social relations by functioning in, against and beyond them; (iii) highlighting their potential for people from different ideological and theoretical affiliations to work together to overcome differences by working on concrete political projects that is referred to a process of left-wing convergence; and, (iv) examining the use of participatory action research for academics involved in political projects as a form of scholar-activism that supports and encourages more overt political engagement under the concept of public sociology. The autonomous learning spaces that feature in this thesis emerged out of the student protests against increased tuition fees and proposed changes to higher education in England that were announced by the UK Coalition Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government in 2010. While these reforms were a tipping point for many involved in these protests, they are part of a much longer ideological and political project that began in the late 1970s to impose a neoliberal model of higher education on the sector. The culmination of these reforms has had a detrimental impact on higher education, including a shift towards less democratic models of university governance, the creation of an unsustainable funding model of higher education, increasingly precarious and intensified working conditions for staff and growing levels of anxiety and debt for students creating a crisis over the nature and purpose of higher education. These changes have not gone unopposed and, in 2010, they triggered a wave of protests, trade union strike action and the occupation of university property by students opposed to these reforms. While these protests failed to prevent the Coalition’s reforms to higher education being implemented, they created a new form of student activism and politics that were part of an attempt to prefigure alternative forms of education and self-organisation. One example of this was the emergence of autonomous learning spaces that experimented with no-fee, alternative models of higher education. This thesis focuses on these experimental spaces and examines what, if anything, can be learned from them to create an alternative model of higher education institution contra to the neoliberal model that has been imposed by successive governments since the 1970s. The research focuses on seven autonomous learning spaces based in the UK, including one, the Social Science Centre (Lincoln, UK), which I was an active member of between 2012 and 2014. Indeed, the research stems from an attempt to document and reflect on my own, and others, experience of being involved in creating and running an autonomous learning space through a participatory action research project. The data was gathered using a mixture of participant observation, 28 semi-structured interviews and web based analysis of minutes of meetings, blog posts and websites. The research found that while these autonomous learning spaces tended to be embryonic, ephemeral and contested spaces, they functioned as places wherein people not only resisted the neoliberlisation of higher education but also experimented with forms of critical pedagogy as well as models of self-organisation that were underpinned by non-hierarchical and democratic principles. The research found that these autonomous learning spaces were characterised by a diversity of different theoretical, political and cultural perspectives and while this caused friction within groups it highlights the potential for people to work together on concrete political projects in a way that show left-wing convergence is possible. The research found that these autonomous learning spaces also had an important affective, non-intellectual dimension. This was supported by bonds of friendship and trust that developed between people working on these projects. The practical and theoretical significance of these autonomous learning spaces, then, is that they have the potential to inform the creation of new higher education institutions or the transformation of old ones along more egalitarian, collectively owned and participatory democratic lines as a response to the neoliberalisation of higher education. Moreover, these autonomous learning spaces provide a fissure of hope and inspiration that alternative ways of being exist that have the potential to challenge, question, rupture and crack the contradictory and exploitative nature of capitalist social relations and create spaces wherein it is possible to prefigure the idea of the university for a post-capitalist society

Analysis of Pleistocene Deposits from Kidder County and Stutsman County, North Dakota

The general purpose of this report is to differentiate Pleistocene (as used by Flint 1957) deposits in Kidder County and Stutsman County, North Dakota, utilizing various laboratory techniques of sedimentary lithologic studies

Accounting Chairpersons Compare Distance Learning Delivery Methodologies

Distance learning delivery methodologies have evolved over the last 100, or so, years since the educational paradigm was formally used in American higher education. Several different approaches to distance learning, where the student is in a location remote from their instructor, have been used. During the decade of the 90s developments in technology offered new delivery vehicles for distance learning and terms like “interactive television” “E mail,” and “Internet courses” have been added to the academic lexicon. Internet courses, where the interaction between faculty and student occurs primarily over the Internet, represent a substantial departure from the traditional learning model