Happy New Year and welcome back. I hope 2025 will be a wonderful year for you. We’ll do our best at DMU to help make that happen.
Today, I want to talk about something that’s often underestimated when it comes to learning and that’s feedback. It’s easy to put all your effort into your assignments and then breathe a sigh of relief when you submit. You probably feel that you’re done. You’ve done your best to show what you learnt, and you move on.
However, that approach means you might miss out on something that’s going to really propel your learning forward and take you to the next level. Your lecturers spend a significant amount of time reviewing, marking, and writing feedback on your assignments. The feedback tells you what you did well, so you can do more of it, and where you might improve or try something different in your next assignment, so you can improve. It’s a powerful tool for boosting your work and learning. You can even think of it as a checklist tailored to you to help you in your next assignment.
As a university, we use feedback from you to improve as well. Every year, we ask students to reflect on their teaching and student experience during something we call ‘survey season’. It starts in late January and runs until April. Whether you’re a first-year undergraduate student, in your final year, or a postgraduate student, you’ll be invited to fill out a survey tailored to your level.
We use the feedback you give us to understand what we’re doing well and continuously improve, just like you do when you implement your lecturers’ feedback. It’s an essential part of how we make our courses and DMU relevant to you and your needs. And it helps inform how we invest our time and resources to give you a great experience while you study with us.
You’ll get more information about the surveys in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out. And take a(nother) look at your feedback from your Block 1 assignment, before you start on your assignment for Block 2. It might just hold the key to unlock a successful 2025 for you.
Posted on Monday 6 January 2025