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December 16, 2005
Voice Feedback
Now that the end of semester has brought piles of final assignments to our desks, I thought it would be helpful to post something about using voice tools to provide feedback and comments on student assignments. I actually meant to do this way back in September following the Instructor orientation that we had, but I suppose it's better late than never. There's also been other posts in the blog world on this topic that you might like to check out, such as this one via Brian.
As an instructor, I enjoy reading student assignments, but find it challenging time-wise to provide a sufficient amount of feedback to a large group of students. Rubrics certainly help the process, but composing a page or two of constructive, critical yet encouraging feedback can take me hours. As a student who has received more than one paper back with only a few words as comments, I'm aware of the importance that feedback is to students, but I'm also aware how an extremely busy faculty member would have a difficult time providing this.
The solution? An ipod (or other mp3 recording device) with a mike (I use an italk). This is how it works if you're teaching in a WebCT system. I have a Mac, but I think the same instructions would apply.
1. use an ipod (with italk) or some other digital recording tool. Record your feedback, into your ipod.
2. Plug the ipod into your computer. Itunes should open up.
3. Find the file that has been uploaded to itunes. It is usually assigned a date as a title…you might find it helpful to change this date to something like “Sonja Assign. 1 feedback”
4. In WebCT, attach the audio file as you would attach a word document and send.
My colleague and I tested this with a group of students last February, and if you're interested you can check out our Elearn presentation here.
Basically, we found the advantages of this approach are:
1. voice allows you to communicate a tone of voice that can be a little more personal and less threatening than text. It also gets closer to the idea of feedback as a dialogue between the author and the reader/s, which is certainly in line with a constructivist approach.
2. distance students feel an enhanced teacher presence with voice as a medium of communication
3. you can pause and play with the ipod without recording any clicks, so the message is seamless (which using your computer and Audicity, for example, doesn't do).
4. it's easier to provide students with more feedback, and lets you provide feedback on some things that would be difficult to reference and compose through text.
You can also do this with the Wimba voice email tool that work inside of WebCT, but if your institution hasn't purchased the tool, you're a bit stuck. (Here at UBC it is available to us). And if your institution isn't using WebCT, you can just record and send by email, although the size of the file might become an issue, even though the ipod is recording very small wav files.
In testing this, we also found that converting the small wav files to mp3 resulted in a loss of quality that wasn't desirable, so going that extra step isn't necessary.
Posted by tannis at December 16, 2005 01:25 PM
Comments
Concerning the size of the file, using Goldwave (a shareware audio software, available at http://www.goldwave.com/), you can considerably compress it without loosing much quality.
Posted by: at January 12, 2006 03:24 PM
Thanks for the tip Roger. I'll keep that in mind in case students start complaining about quality. So far the small wav files seem to be acceptable, but maybe the novelty hasn't worn off yet.
Posted by: tannis at January 12, 2006 10:13 PM