As Katie Lepi showed in her recent article, the use of video in education is fast emerging as an efficient, creative, and effective way to help students learn.

Over the past year I have been experimenting with assessment methods and have found that using video is now the best way for me to assess the Creative Media and the Diploma in Teaching students @BCoT – the rationale being that the learners, so used to consuming information from a resource-rich moving image centred multimedia experience, are provided with more detailed, personalised, and engaging feedback that is in keeping with the way they choose to consume information in their free time.

Similarly, by asking learners to submit video responses themselves (on phones/ vine/ webcams) they too are encouraged to embrace the technology driven environment of industry, enhance their digital literacy, demonstrate ICT competency, and develop their own communication skills in a real differentiated option to achieve criteria beyond the traditionalist (written) assessment.

By using an ‘Intro>Criteria>Pros>Cons>Grade>Tips for Improvement’ structure I’m finding that I mark more effectively when recording Video Feedback. The immediate nature of me assessing the students essays/ blogs/ practical tasks and then being able to appear on the learners screen to address them by name and provide specific detail as to how they can amend is eliciting comparably specialised responses and improvements.

Benefits For Teachers

Using video is an efficient use of time and allows you to provide visual examples to illustrate points in more detailed verbal feedback

Securely stored and shared to your students from the cloud eg inboxing or tweeting links from Dropbox OR shared from your Hard Drive

YouTube can be used (ease of access) where you can adjust the settings to Private so no-one but your student can see it

Once students send you work you can assess wherever you are using any video recording device

Benefits For Students

Video feedback provides a chance to revisit/ review more personal and detailed feedback through any device

Learners can pause the feedback and make suggested alterations and improve work

Feedback is more fun, detailed, and personal for the learner as they are addressed down the lens conversationally

I am able to focus on the minutiae of the students work and provide idiosyncratic responses for each learner that I just wouldn’t have the time to discuss/ mention in my written feedback or all 20-30 students for each Assignment. I am less generic and am able to elaborate my points with more passion, precision, and focus than I would ordinarily do in a written piece of feedback.

Whilst video feedback is not always useful or appropriate for everyone (audio feedback is a good alternative if you are camera shy) or even every assignment (I still annotate Google Docs with written comments) it is increasingly clear to me and my practice that by utilizing video we can help learners and help ourselves to mark more efficiently and free up time to keep learning new educational tools.

If you want help developing Video feedback for your learners and/ or want to collaborate on projects with the glorious @bcotmedia students, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks for reading.

Scott Hayden
Lecturer/ Specialist Practitioner in Social Media and Educational Technology @ Basingstoke College of Technology

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