Design narrative: Open Mentor

Open Mentor is a tool to support tutors in the feedback process and addresses the following problem: that a balanced combination of socio-emotive and cognitive support is required in the feedback from teaching staff and the feedback needs to be relevant to the assigned grade. Open Mentor analyses and displays the different types of comments provided by the tutor as feedback to the students, and it then provides reflective comments to the tutor about their use of feedback. This work followed a pedagogically-driven development process, beginning by developing scenarios of use, then storyboards, and then putting in place an implementation which would follow closely the pattern of these storyboards. Open Mentor was not designed for use at institutional level, but to give teaching staff a tool that can be used in training and also later as personal support that will enable individual tutors to track their use of feedback to students. This work was developed in conjunction with Stuart Watt at Robert Gordon University as part of Open Mentor a JISC funded project (see: http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=4126)