A Word in Your Ear - audio feedback in higher education

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New! I-Chant Chiang's presentation on audio feedback is included in a video clip created by the Leeds University Building Capacity project. You can view the clip on YouTube.

View the poster presented at the conference. More information about the audio feedback project at AU can be found on the JISC project website.

The conference at Sheffield went really well. It was a full day but lots of useful information. I learned a lot from the other delegates, and also gave tips to the more novice users. Lots of great ideas came through, and new technology to check out! The poster was well-received and even won honourable mention! It was good to hear that the same challenges facing us are the same ones facing others. However, that means there is more work for everyone to do! Some learnings:

• Not all students love audio feedback. A project at Exeter found that 1st year students who received audio feedback on their 1st assignment at university found it very upsetting even though they do find it helpful in the end. Perhaps 1st year is too early to give audio feedback? We must be careful to be gentle with them. In our study, we also have a few students that have reported similar feelings.

• Some of our students requested both audio and written feedback because while audio is richer, written is more "permanent". We don't think that is a realistic option in terms of staff work load, but there is a possible way to integrate both if we use Dragon, which is a natural speech processing software. Some of the delegates have been using it with some degree of success. Another idea that someone had was to ask the students to take notes on the audio feedback that they receive so that they do have a written version of the feedback. This technique would also promote active learning and encouraging them to use the feedback more.

• There is apparently a Wimba voice tool that allows lecturers to record audio feedback directly into Blackboard. Also, Adobe Connect Pro (formerly Breeze?) also has this same capacity.

• One delegate said that he encourages students to share and compare their audio feedback with each other so that they have a better picture of what lecturers expect of them.

• There could be more workshops or guidelines to the students when they first encounter audio feedback in terms of how to use it and listen to it. Perhaps more guidelines for staff are in order, too, so that a team-taught module could have some consistency in terms of duration, types of comments, or even phrases that should be emphasised.

• Other users have found similar results as we did, that different types of feedback can be targeted for different uses. For example, audio feedback is good for comments on structure and justifying why the lecturer gave a certain mark or suggestion. However, written feedback is preferred for single comments and correcting spelling and grammar. Also, the balance of positive and negative comments is a bit off in audio feedback: lecturers tend to give more negative comments than positive, so we should be more conscious about not only focusing on the negatives.

• One technique I found interesting was the "immediate" release of feedback. One lecturer sampled 10 essays after submission and within 24 hours, put up a podcast to give generic feedback to the whole class based on some common mistakes found in that small sample.

• A study done in the US showed that students were 5-6 times more likely to apply higher order thinking (from Bloom's taxonomy) to content that had received audio feedback.

• A linguistic analysis of audio feedback from a project at Leicester showed that lecturers are constantly balancing their role as "expert judge" and "supportive guide" in their audio feedback. Positive audio feedback tends to be very informal and colloquial and negative audio feedback is more hedged and softened compared to written. There are also more instances of lecturers sharing (relevant) personal experiences in audio feedback to help the students. These patterns result in shortening the distance between lecturer and student.

There are some interesting directions that I would like to pursue for semester two, some of it to alleviate staff burdens of dealing with the technology. Overall, the conference was incredibly useful, and I'm glad I went.