Building connections is essential in higher education and vocational institutions. Connection breeds a sense of belonging for students and enables them to feel more confident in their chosen discipline. It is fundamental to a student’s quality of learning.
Whether you are a teacher, trainer, tutor, or lecturer, building connections with your students is imperative. You can achieve this by providing quality assessment feedback to support your learners’ growth and success.
Feedback goes beyond the learner’s grade. Effective feedback is constructive for the educator to support the learner to improve in the necessary areas and enhance their results. Feedback is communicated to empower and ignite the process of self-reflection and cultivate critical thinking.
As reported in The Conversation, a teacher, Marisol, said, “Feedback should be ‘feeding-forward’ somewhere or having some value that students see is going to influence the future assignment.”
Despite text being the most common style of feedback delivery for online courses, it is not considered best practice. Researchers found that text-based feedback evoked negative emotional responses among students and lacked the nuance necessary to motivate and improve student outcomes. This especially rings true for students categorised as ‘at risk’. Text lacks the richness of emotional cues and non-verbal communication that contribute to clear understanding and emotional connection.
Technology-enhanced feedback refers to audio and video feedback and is considered best practice in education and training. Video and audio feedback can transform the student experience into a more positive, empowering learning experience, and increase student success. Studies have revealed that students perceive technology-enhanced feedback as more meaningful than text-based feedback. Students have shared that seeing and hearing their educators makes the feedback more personal and conversational, allowing students to feel like their education matters and build better student connections with educators. More importantly, video and audio feedback have increased student engagement, knowledge retention of feedback, and improved marking efficiency and quality.
In a study conducted by Kelly Cunningham, which compared the time taken to complete feedback for each assessment, it was found that video feedback took 33% less time.
I've done work on screencast feedback (audio over video of the paper on screen) and it's so much quicker, for the instructor and students revising and they tend to do a better job on those revisions
— Kelly J. Cunningham, PhD (@ESLCunningham) November 3, 2022
Learner feedback is a never-ending pursuit – provided honestly and fairly to students before they submit their final submission. Hence, educators should take the initiative to creatively provide feedback and structure their courses to enable virtual, video, or audio feedback channels.
Tools for Video Feedback
A tool that helps educators provide effective asynchronous and synchronous video and audio feedback is eSkilled Learning Management System (LMS). Transform your students’ learning journey by utilising the most effective form of feedback.
eSkilled LMS empowers students and assessors by offering a remarkable feature: the ability to seamlessly integrate video or audio feedback into assignments. This extraordinary capability enhances the learning experience and assessment process, setting a new standard for excellence in education.
eSkilled LMS Virtual classroom allows educators to elicit synchronous learner feedback face-to-face with the student during a class prior to the student submitting an assessment. Studies have shown that this approach enables educators to assist learners in enhancing their performance and coursework before they finalise their assessments.
An essential responsibility of educators is to embrace the role of nurturing their learners and enabling them to excel in their chosen courses or careers. By humanising the design of courses with video and audio-enhanced feedback, educators can build connectedness with their learners. Critically thinking about the impact of feedback can support learners to achieve the best possible outcomes in their course and discipline. The implications of technology-enhanced feedback not only save educators time when marking a number of assessments. Technology enhanced feedback also provide learners with a more encouraging, positive experience.
Setup Technology Enhanced Feedback Delivery in eSkilled LMS
Incorporating audio and video feedback through direct audio and video recordings within the Assignment Activity is remarkably straightforward and effortless. The maximum duration for recording audio or video feedback is two minutes.
Step 1: Begin by accessing the Assignment Activity where you wish to provide video feedback.
Step 2: Click on the “Grade” button to proceed.
Step 3: As the submissions load, navigate to the “Feedback comments” section on the right side of the screen.
Step 4: To incorporate video feedback, simply select the video camera icon in the HTML toolbar.
Step 5: A pop-up window will appear. Click “Start recording” to initiate the recording process.
*Note: Make sure your browser grants permission to access the camera for this feature.
Step 6: Once your recording is complete, click “Stop recording.”
Step 7: You’ll have the option to review your recording or re-record it if needed. When satisfied with the video feedback, click “Attach video recording.”
Step 8: Observe that the video feedback file is now attached in the comments section. To finalise the process, click “Save changes.”
The same steps can be applied to create audio feedback as well. For detailed, step-by-step instructions, with photo examples on how to attach audio feedback in the Assignment Activity, please refer to our Help Centre.
