My tutor wrote to all of the tutor group late on Sunday night. It was part introduction, part apology for not writing sooner, and part reminder of an upcoming tutorial. I can't say too much about the personal content as it might identify them, but it seemed very sincere. It would have been nice to receive an acknowledgment of my introductory letter though. The TMA00 that I sent quite a while ago seems to have been ignored.
The very first tutorial of the module, which was a 2-hour jobbie, could best be described as clinical and impersonal. The tutor didn't introduce themselves, launched straight in the content, and finished by insincerely thanking all of us for coming, then ended the session quite abruptly. The area covered was mostly elementary mathematics such as rounding numbers to appropriate significant figures, ratios & fractions, simple geometry, logarithmic graphs & half-lives. At the end there was a bit on the Periodic table & normalisation. It may have been of some benefit to some of the cohort, but I felt it was an opportunity wasted, and it really didn't set the tone of the module particularly well. There were 19 students attending at the start of the tutorial, but this had dropped to 13 by the end of the 2-hour (with a 15 minute break) marathon stint. Due to the decline in attendees during the session, I suspect the other students appeared to be of the same mind as myself.
On Wednesday I received a very strange email from the 'Director of Teaching for Physical Sciences' no less, saying that a post-exam verification process was going to be put in place at the end of all level 2 and level 3 modules that have an online exam. This involves carrying out a 15 minute recorded interview a few days after the exam to verify the identity of approximately 15% of the candidates and 'asking a few questions' but it was all a bit vague. I suspect it's another half-cocked OU box ticking initiative which hasn't been fully worked out yet just to pacify the quality people.
I had a 'Meet the STEM Associate Deans' Microsoft Teams meeting on Thursday evening. Like all Teams meetings it had technical issues, mostly due to insufficient bandwidth, but it struggled on regardless. Not that much was particularly relevant to the Physical Sciences, but it was encouraging that some students raised the issue of the newly launched Biomedical Science degree not being accredited by the IBMS. The staff representatives handled, i.e. sidestepped, that one very nicely. It was great to see corporate diplomacy in action.
Quite late on Friday evening I had a tutorial from the tutor who marks my assignments. It was both similar in some respects but different in others to the first S283 tutorial a few days earlier. This tutor was far more personable and friendly, which is a very good sign, and they introduced themselves to the cohort quite nicely. There were about 8 attendees which is about normal for a 20 or so tutor group. The session contained the normal stuff about submission formatting, word length of answers, plagiarism, the use of AI, the end of module exam etc. It was progressing quite nicely until about 20 minutes towards the end when the tutor appeared to run out of things to say and started eating something. The tutorial then just petered out, which was a bit surreal to be honest. Although this was the best tutorial I've had so far connected with this module, the bar had been set very low.