Monitoring the monitoring: Exploring the impact of structured monitoring meetings on DE100 monitor satisfaction, dialogue and feedback

• Project Team: Charlotte Lattin-Rawstrone
• Subject Discipline: Psychology and Counselling
• Theme: AssessmentOnline and blended tuition
• Project Aim: Improves and enhance the learning experience of students
• Status: Live
• Date: July 2022 to July 2023

The Open University is unique in its provision of distance learning provision to a vast number of learners. Distance tuition relies on a high standard of correspondence tuition as it is the feedback that students receive that is the basis of their personalised learning journey. A great deal of scholarship work and research has been carried out, both within the OU and externally, into what constitutes ‘good’ written feedback in distance learning for student (for example Carless and Winstone, 2020; Nicols, 2010; Henderson, Molloy, Ajjawi and Boud, 2019).

The aim of this project is to build on previous research and on work being conducted by the OU’s Monitoring Oversight Group. The study will focus on the management and monitoring of feedback by internal peer monitoring processes on a ‘micro’ scale by examining the impact of a meeting-based structured approach to support the peer monitoring on the module. This will be managed by the module team within one module in FASS DE100 - Investigating Psychology. The module selected is the largest module within the Psychology and Counselling Faculty.  

This project intends to use the findings of the previous studies to embed further training and development within the module monitoring process by running meetings for monitors with module team members for each assignment to: 

1. reflect on practice and issues specific to the module and the assignment  
2. disseminate good practice and identify concerns   
3. build on opportunities for discussion and dialogue between Associate Lecturer monitors and between Associate Lecturer monitors and the Module Team. 

To measure the impact of this, the post-presentation report from monitors will be analysed, along with feedback from the monitor sessions. This will assist in development for the module team and subsequent monitoring training, and it is hoped that it will contribute to developing good practice and confirming monitoring as a respected professional activity, and an attractive aspect of the Associate Lecturer role. Results and findings will also be fed back to the Monitoring Oversight Group.