Abstract

Effective student feedback is essential in enhancing the teaching and learning process. Ever increasing class sizes means that feedback is often being delivered too slowly, and lacking in the necessary quality to be effective (Glover & Brown 2006). Students must have routine access to the criteria and standards for the task they need to master; they must have feedback in their attempts to master those tasks, and they must have opportunities to use the feedback. Excellence is attained by such cycles of model-practice-feedback-perform. With the issue of retention becoming increasingly important, effective feedback is essential as a way of engaging with students and aiding the teaching and learning process. To gain a deeper insight into the possible use of screencasting as a feedback tool, a pilot project funded by the Higher Education Academy was undertaken with BSc (Hons.) Architectural Technology & Management students at the University of Ulster. The project looked at an alternative method of delivering feedback to Architectural Technology students, who were learning to use a new Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawing package. Traditionally, written feedback was provided to the students, but discussions with them found that this wasn’t very effective. It became apparent that the students did not use written feedback to improve their future work, despite a relatively quick return for assignments, because the topics studied had moved on. The feedback was therefore not timely. The aim was to offer a mechanism which would provide effective, detailed and timely feedback in a manner the students could relate to and thus utilise it to feed-forward, enhancing their future work. The research was undertaken with a group of forty students who had to complete two separate assessments for a particular module. Written feedback was provided for the first submission, with screencasting software being used to create short video clips as feedback for the second submission. The project hoped to gain an insight into the students preferred feedback methods and try to determine what can be done to make feedback more effective. The findings from this study will be useful to academics in numerous disciplines that are committed to providing a quality education where effective and productive feedback is of paramount importance.