Masters Level Teaching, Learning and Assessment: Issues in Design and Delivery

This week I received a copy of the "Masters Level Teaching, Learning and Assessment: Issues in Design and Delivery" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). There was a thank-you note from the editor,  Pauline Kneale on the back of a postcard of Cornwall. After a bit of head-scratching, I remembered that I had answered some questions about my masters teaching experience for the book. The postcard was explained by Pauline being PVC at Plymouth University. 

As the introduction to the book points out, there has been considerable research undertaken into undergraduate degrees and postgraduate research programs, but taught masters tend to get forgotten somewhere in the middle. Coursework masters (as they tend to be known in Australia) have been seen by universities as a way to expand the market for their undergraduate courses, with minimal extra investment put into making the assessment slightly more challenging.

As Kneale's book points out, masters students are different to undergraduates and have different requirements. The benefit for the university in considering the needs of masters students will be less complaints and a group of students who are very much easier to teach. 

I am quoted in the book in Chapter 2 "The Diversity of Master's Provisions" (p. 22) and at the beginning of Part 5 "Curriculum Design" (p. 201). But I was a little annoyed to find that these were not formally cited or listed in the references.