Sounding Good: Exploring the potential of audio feedback

Stephen Dixon

Abstract

Most academics find the process of giving detailed, appropriate feedback to students an extremely time-consuming one. With increased VLE use and blended approaches to delivery, opportunities are now available to re-appraise different ways of recording and giving feedback to students. Under the auspices of the Joint Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) Sounds Good project (Rotheram, 2009a), the main aims of this research project were to test the hypothesis that using digital audio feedback can benefit staff and students by both saving assessors’ time and providing richer feedback to students. During a compulsory first year module for Education Studies students at Newman University College, 83 students were asked to submit a 1500 word essay as a text file via Moodle. This online submission allowed for both traditional written annotation of the original script as well as the embedding of an audio mp3 file for student feedback. A total of six Education Studies teaching staff were involved in the marking process, and views were elicited from both staff and students via questionnaire after the marking process was completed. Initial findings show that an overwhelming majority of respondents were very enthusiastic about the use of audio feedback, although a number of guidelines and recommendations were needed for its future use.

 

Dixon, S. (2010) Sounding Good: Exploring the potential of audio feedback. Educationalfutures, [online] Vol. 2(3). Available at: https://educationstudies.org.uk/?p=511 [Accessed 28 Mar, 2024].

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