A system to deliver oral and visual feedback on-line,
personal to each student

Description

This project piloted the use of screen recording with an audio track to summarise for a student why an assignment got the mark it did and how it might be improved. It was anticipated this method would cater for more learning styles (visual, aural, kinesthetic) than the traditional methods; better enable markers to provide more expansive feedback; facilitate more personalised feedback to the student; and be widely applicable to any assignment that can be submitted on-line.

We show that screen recording with simultaneous commentary can be successfully delivered as feedback on a large undergraduate course. We found that it was most appropriately delivered as a summary given at the end of conventional written feedback. In this way the strengths, weaknesses and options for remedy could be delivered to the students in a way that might be more engaging than if the same information was written. Students rated the overall quality of feedback more highly if it were in video form. Some markers had great facility with this method, but others found that they needed more practice. The system worked with Microsoft products, Excel and Word, and was integrated with screen recording software (Camtasia from Techsmith) in a seamless package that launched with button clicks.

Outcomes and Downloads

• The Benefit of Screen Recorded Summaries in Feedback for Work Submitted Electronically(available in pdf format); a paper about the project by Wesley Kerr and Paul McLaughlin, given at the 2008 CAA Conference
• Project report (pdf format)
• Software (note this is a large .zip file of 46.6. MB)
• View the PowerPoint slides from a presentation entitled 'The Benefit of Screen Recorded Summaries in Feedback on Work Submitted Electronically' given by Paul at the 2009 Bioscience Reps Forum

Links

Related information on feedback to students

• Development and implementation of a policy for delivering effective feedback to students within The School of Biology, Chemistry and Health Sciences at MMU: a departmental teaching enhancement scheme project
• Glover, C. and Brown, E. (2006) Written Feedback for Students: too much, too detailed or too incomprehensible to be effective? Bioscience Education E–journal, volume 7 available at http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol7/beej-7-3.aspx
• Download and read our themed Bulletin on Feedback & Feed-Forward
• Case Study: Giving audio-visual feedback to students using Jing and Grademark, by Sheila Hope at Keele University
• ASSET: Moving Forward through Feedback project. This JISC-funded project led by the University of Reading aims to develop an innovative, interactive Web 2.0 resource, 'ASSET', to encourage staff to experiment with the use of video media to provide feed forward and feedback to students on their assignments.
• Read the reports from our Effective Feedback to Students events at Wolverhampton and at the London Knowledge Lab
• Formative Assessment in Science Teaching
  This FDTL4 project examined how students’ formative assessment experiences affect their learning and looked at how feedback to students can be made more effective.
• Feedback to students – Extracts from "2000 tips for Lecturers" edited by Phil Race
• Hounsell D., Hounsell J., Litjens J. and McCune V. (2005) Enhancing guidance and feedback to students: findings on the impact of evidence-informed initiatives, European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) 11th Biennial Conference Nicosia, Cyprus, 23 – 27 August 2005. Available at http://www.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/earliHHLM.pdf