I have to say that this is the first time in my long and illustrious teaching career that I have ever looked at my feedback in such depth

• early on, my feedback used to belong to the "you need to pull your socks up" school of feedback
• then came the feedback sandwich and medal and mission
• then came the realisation that feedback and the learning process should ideally not be a top-down process; the emphasis should be on the student taking responsibility for their own learning
• and now we reach a new level of sophistication with the excellent level of feedback achieved by the OU, along the lines suggested by Bales - though the challenge is for the tutor to maintain a balance between top-downness and leaving the student to sink in a sea of vagueness and unanswered questions