Reducing the distance in distance education

Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs) are the major mechanism by which Open University (OU) students receive feedback on their academic progress. This paper shows how the OU has used ICT to improve both the quality of feedback and speed of response to student work, reduce feelings of isolation and make the university seem less remote. The paper examines the system for online submission and return of TMAs, their on-screen marking, and the automated processing of scores and feedback. It shows how the system provides effective feedback to students and their tutors, using ICT to underpin the overall assessment process, and enables new teaching strategies to be used at an institutional level. The system produces faster turnaround of marked TMAs, faster feedback to tutors on their performance and more up to date management information. Better quality feedback to students has also resulted from an interactive loop of dialogue between student and tutor, and improved management information for monitoring. The automated recording of TMA scores has lead to improved accuracy of assessment records that feed into the conflation of continuous assessment records with examination results to produce the overall course results. These developments have enabled course teams to develop new methods of assessment, such as electronic format assignments (e.g. websites and hyperlinked documents), executable files, dynamic templates and other interactive activities.