Screen cast feedback - a case study of the affordances of an alternative method of feedback to students

This study examines the affordances of recorded audio over a video screen cast as a method to improve the student’s experience and quality of receiving feedback on undergraduate assessments in engineering.
Students were engaged in a dialog to understand how they would like to receive feedback such that it best fitted their needs. This allowed them to take ownership of the feedback method and assisted in engagement. It was found that the perceived quality of traditional written feedback can be severely impacted by basic problems such as providing sufficient detail, clearly identifying the specific areas under discussion and even the legibility of handwriting. However, providing recorded audio over a video screen cast of the assessment eliminates these problems almost entirely. Students noted that the ability to record the vocals allowed for a significantly richer form of communication, capturing the assessor’s inflection and removing the possible miscommunication of emotion that can occur with basic text.
The study saw a 12% improvement in the student’s perception of usefulness of feedback, leading to an average score of 80% satisfaction, with a significant skew towards a positive response after the intervention. Using the authors’ experiences, procedural recommendations are made. Whilst the first attempt at this method did increase the total time invested in providing the feedback, the second example in the study was significantly more efficient and estimated as equivalent to written forms.