Understanding the Pedagogical signifiance of Higher Education Wherever It's Taught

This paper discusses the findings of a project run in association with the fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning 5 (FDTL) project Engaging Students with Assessment Feedback: What works? The original FDTL project, based at Oxford brookes University, started in the academic year of 05/06 with a group of lead institutions developing a set of four models desgined to enhance student engagement with assessment feedback in Higher Education (phase one). During 06/07 the findings were disseminated to an extended group of cascade partner institutions who were tasked with testing and evaluating these models (phase two). At this stage all project work had been done in business schools, but by the end of phase two the project team was keen to futher test the models with a series of micro projects in other disciplines. Following a presentation of their work by the project team at the University of Sunderland the authors agreed to run a micro project to test the models with Higher education (HE) courses taught in Further Edcuation Colleges (FECs), using as a case study a Foundation Degree (FD) in Education and Care which is delivered across a number of collaborative partner colleges. This case study was considered to be a particularly useful test of the project models, since Foundation Degrees like the example chosen have been criticised for inconsistencies in the feedback and assessment of student's work, which is unsurprising given teh number of staff and students involved. However, anaomalises such as this provide a platform for challenging such inconsistencies and trialling of new approaches to engage students with their assessment feedback and learning opportunities.