Tuesday 11 November 2008

Here Goes....

Hi, this is my first post to the Sounds Good blog, and I only have 10 minutes or so. I'm Steve Dixon, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Newman University College, and we're just about to start audio feedback.

Literally.

As in about nine and a half minutes time.

We're trialling with our first year cohort, so we have about 80 students or so. All the students have submitted an essay via Moodle (our VLE), and we're adding in-text comments then providing a link to the audio feedback, again via Moodle. The setting up and administration of this has been fairly straightforward, although as we have a marking team for this (6 staff), I've also had to deliver training sessions and write guidelines (Bob's original documentation was incredibly useful in this respect). We're using Handy H4s for recording, although one or two of the marking team have hinted at a preference for digital microphones.

OK, I now have less than 5 minutes before we have a last meeting before we start marking and giving feedback, and coffee is important. Wish us luck...

1 comment:

Bob Ridge-Stearn said...

Good Luck! Hope it went well, Steve.
I’ve just been talking to Julie Blackwell-Young in Psychology about how others are distributing the audio files and mentioned that you were providing them as assignment feedback in Moodle (I gave her your instructions for staff). This would work fine for her too and I think she will be looking into it. Others might be emailing the files to the students. It might depend on whether you know the identity of the students. I think Tony Ward is saving his feedback files in a network folder and telling students to go and get their feedback. Maybe this is because he doesn’t know the identity of the students and is working on student numbers. Not sure. I’ll have to ask him.

By the way, initial reaction from Julie is that it is saving her time as previously she marked away from a computer and later typed up her notes. With audio marking she can mark away from the computer by reading the work and recording her thoughts and advice as she reads and not have to type up later. She also says she is giving more comprehensive feedback.

Bob Ridge-Stearn
Head of e-Learning