<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><xml><records><record><source-app name="Biblio" version="6.x">Drupal-Biblio</source-app><ref-type>17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Whitelock, D. M.</style></author><author><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Watt, S. N. K.</style></author><author><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Moreale, E.</style></author><author><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Raw, Y.</style></author></authors></contributors><titles><title><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Analysing tutor feedback to students: first steps towards constructing an electronic monitoring system</style></title><secondary-title><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Association for Learning Technology Journal</style></secondary-title></titles><dates><year><style  face="normal" font="default" size="100%">2004</style></year></dates><volume><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">11</style></volume><pages><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">31-42</style></pages><isbn><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">0968-7769</style></isbn><language><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">eng</style></language><abstract><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">The digital university is becoming more fact than fiction with the adoption of Virtual learning environments in UK universities, accompanied by a number of pedagogical and administrative advantages (Hazemi and Hailes 2002). This type of infrastructure offers the possibility of adding further services to support tutors, monitors and students as they learn to grade and write essays and reports. This in turn would enable monitors to focus on assignments that most need their attention by providing tutors with high quality feedback. This paper reports the findings from phase one of a feasibility study to assist the monitoring of student essays. It analyses tutor comments from these electronically marked assignments and investigates how they match the mark awarded to each essay by the tutor. This has involved carrying out a category analysis of the tutors? feedback to the students from the UK Open University course H801 ? ?Masters in Open and Distance Learning?. Bales? (1950) ?interactional categories? were adopted as the theoretical basis for analysing the tutor comments. The advantage of this category system is that it distinguishes between task-oriented contributions, and the ?socio-emotive? element used by tutors to maintain student motivation. This secondary analysis reveals not only how the tutor makes recommendations to improve the assignment content, but also provides in a subtle, rich, and sophisticated manner, emotional support for the student. This Bales? analysis was presented to a group of tutors who felt an electronic feedback system based on this model would help them to get the right balance of responses to their students. These findings provide a modest start to designing a model of feedback for tutors of distance education students. Future work will entail refining these categories and testing this model with a larger sample from a different subject domain</style></abstract></record></records></xml>