By Kate Campbell-Pilling
We all know how time consuming it is to create meaningful valuable feedback, and so the emotional effort needed must be worthwhile. We want our students to be receptive to our feedback and know how to use it properly. We are all likely to have experienced students who don’t engage with or even read their feedback. We reflected on how frustrating this is so we considered whether there were more effective methods of delivering feedback that could address these issues.
Students increasingly devote more time and attention to multimedia which can be accessed more flexibly and navigated in different ways. Is pure text now more difficult for them to engage with? There are additional benefits to moving away from pure text feedback as audio feedback can enable the marker to utilise a wider range of factors such as voice intonation which can help our students to better understand our formerly written comments and bring a greater level of emotional connection and engagement with their feedback.
What did we do?
Audio feedback can be simply recording your voice giving feedback to a student and can be done easily through Kaltura Media which is accessible via Muse. See these resources on how to create content. Kaltura also offers the ability to record your screen so that you can highlight the part of the assessment being spoken about. The marker can choose to mark before or during recording the feedback, without comments on the script and we have successfully used a variety of these methods.
Interestingly, Kaltura can give analytical data on how many times, when and which parts of the feedback have been accessed, which isn’t possible with pure text feedback.
Where next?
Initially we used this method of feedback in formative assessments focussing on strengths, weaknesses and feedforward comments. We have successfully used it to help students develop ongoing projects and most recently for feedback on summative assessments from the Autumn Semester. We are reflecting on this now.
What was the impact?
We feel that audio feedback deepens the quality of the feedback we give, it provides potentially useful analytics and feels worthwhile. Student feedback is predominantly positive and very receptive to this method, comments describe it being clearer, the benefit of hearing tone and a perception of care.
Our next blog post by Gareth Bramley talks about the emotional connection between the marker and the student so don’t miss reading more about that!