Hi, until recently I also worked for another distance learning organisation, one with charitable status to boot, that indeed provided many of the confirmations you suggest because they had a huge admin team, a head office and a lot of paperwork (the main reason I'm not still working for them!) Trouble was their courses had half the number of modules as ours and cost very nearly twice as much.

We have Elliot - he's brilliant, part time and we work him, oh we work him! With the number of students we have a quick email is more like sixty quick emails, a few letters - because everyone is not on email or email accounts are dead, a few telephone calls and well, as anyone who has tried to do this sort of thing knows, it can turn into a days work.

We could have the tutors do it but you know who they are and how busy they are - so again we would have to employ tutors who are nothing other than tutors who had lots of time to send emails and post off cards - but then you wouldn't get Barney, Angela, Scott from WDC and me.

So bear with us, we'll in time hopefully develop a method that doesn't eat up precious resources and in the meantime we'll try to make the right compromises as compromises always have to be made.

If you've not had your assignment back inside three weeks then do give Elliot a call and he'll give you the status - which is most probably on my desk at the mo!