Not quite a Masters

A couple of events have occurred recently that seem to have steered me to this point.

1. The wife wants me to do a Masters degree.
2. Several inspirational colleagues have done/are starting a Masters degree (including the awesome @daibarnes).
3. I’ve been involved in some research with a colleague for LSIS (although he did the researching and writing up, I did some technical gubbins to do with a contextual UI for VLEs).
4. A tweet a couple of weeks ago talked about the advantages of giving feedback via screencasts.
5. Graeme Boxwell of City of Sunderland College presented some of his research on giving audio feedback (also undertaken for LSIS) at a recent event for North Eastern HE & FE learning technologists.

I’m thinking that I don’t really have the time/energy/money/urge to do a full on Masters right now (although I do like the idea of getting one done eventually), but this idea of giving formative feedback using multimedia seems an intriguing one.

The plan then, at this point, is to have a go and see if it’s a reasonable idea. Try to convince some colleagues to try it out, do some questionnaires with staff and students and see how things go next academic year. As a buy-in for my colleagues I’m hoping somebody like JISC will be prepared to fund the research, and that way I can offer some financial incentive for the time spent training, reviewing and filling in questionnaires.

And if I write it down publicly, I’ll be much more inclined to get it done!