Formative feedback is considered very important in
the learning process as it enables learners to consolidate their strengths,
identify their weaknesses and realize how to improve. Research suggests that high quality formative feedback should
have the following attributes:
- it is given in a timely manner
- it is empowering
- individualized
- manageable
- specific, and
- directly related to assessment criteria
Research also suggests that the method that feedback is communicated
may play a role in learners’ engagement with the feedback. The prevailing
electronic methods of providing formal formative feedback on student submitted
work include:
- assessment rubrics,
- feedback forms, and
- annotations on submitted work.
Certain technologies, such as TurnItIn GradeMark, actually
somewhat combine the above three techniques. Rubrics, feedback forms and
annotations do foster the provision of high quality feedback and certainly
facilitate the distribution of formative feedback to students. But how
‘engaging’ are these methods for the learners?
Professor Phil
Race, one of the leading experts on formative assessment and feedback in
the UK, mentions: “Feedback on paper is the most dangerous, most widely-used, yet least
effective way of helping students to learn from their triumphs and disasters.
Face-to-face feedback helps students to make sense of their thinking, aided by
tone of voice, facial expression, body language, encouraging smiles, speed of
speech, emphasis on particular words, and the ability to fine-tune the feedback
on the basis of how it is being received. Paper-based feedback allows for none
of these, and is rarely used at all well by students”.
Techniques that can provide high quality feedback
that also incorporate the affective advantages of face-to-face communication
include podcasts (used for many years) and videos (a more recent approach). In
this blog post I would like to share my approach to providing formative
feedback with video. More specifically, in the previous semester for the unit
“Database Systems” students had to design a database for a sports related
website. The feedback mechanism included:
- a 20-minute video for each team (total 12 teams) with individualized feedback on the submitted work.
- a 30-minute video with the model solutions to the practical. A Wacom (a type of a mouse in a form of pen-on-a-pad) was used to draw in real-time and explain the solution.
While the videos are actually screencasts, I turned
on the web camera to also record myself in order to incorporate affective
aspects. In this way, the student experience is, up to a point, similar to as
if they were next to me and I was explaining to them what they did
correct/wrong.
The size of the video files was an issue and
needless to say they could not be emailed. Each video was approximately 500 MB
in size, and in order to distribute them to students, I chose to upload them on
YouTube (unlisted for privacy
purposes). Apart from students finding it really engaging to watch their
feedback on YouTube, the popular video platform enabled me to have viewing
statistics (and thus see if students watched the video) but also enabled
interaction with the students through the comments feature.
Below you can see the videos. The first one is the
model-answers video while the second one is the individual feedback for one of
the teams:
Two obvious questions arise. The first one is “what
did students think and was it worth it?” Well, I distributed a questionnaire approximately a week
after I uploaded the videos and students anonymously expressed their opinion. Although
the results are extremely positive just by going through the responses, unfortunately
I didn’t find the opportunity to formally perform statistical analysis yet.
What I did do, however, is create a Wordle with the statements that students
wrote in an open-ended question of the survey. The question asked students to
write maximum five sentences/words that described their experience with
receiving formative feedback through video. The Wordle can be seen below (the
size of the fonts reflects occurrences of responses). It is worth to note that
there were no negative comments.
The second obvious question is “how long did it
take?” Well, once I figured out the settings for
the software tool and the Windows operating system, it took exactly as long as it would take me to evaluate the
assignment without recording the video. In other words, 20 minutes per
submission. To be honest, I strongly believe that it would have taken much longer to type the feedback comments and I certainly wouldn’t be able to type as much as
I am saying in the video. Uploading the videos on YouTube was the only time
consuming thing (35 minutes per video); but this can be done as a batch process
(all of them at once), and once you click the upload button, you can do
something else.
Certainly not all types of submitted assignments
are suitable for video feedback. And certainly many teachers do not wish to be
recorded. But as you probably understood, it was my choice to include my beardy
face 😊 in the video, which could have just been a simple screencast (with only
my voice). In any case, there is a huge trend towards using multimedia in
learning/teaching and video is undoubtedly one of the most powerful
technologies.
If anyone is interested, I would be more than happy
to tell you the software tools that I used and most importantly the settings on
them and on Windows.
Thanos Hatziapostolou
Senior Lecturer, Computer Science Department
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