eAssessment & Audio Feedback

Giving audio feedback is something I have heard talked about by a few people recently.

One of the advantages I can see in using audio feedback for assessment is that it can take significantly less time to process each individual student than the typical and traditional hand- (or PC-) written feedback. If you think it might take 10 minutes per student to give written feedback and include or upload it to the VLE, it could take something like 4 minutes to produce the short audio clip and load this instead.

Not bad, a 60% reduction in time needed per student. So, let’s look at an example of a cohort of 200 students:

  • Written feedback for 200 students @ 10 minutes each = 2000 minutes, or 33.3 hours
  • Audio feedback for 200 students @ 4 minutes each = 800 minutes, or 13.3 hours

Wow, that’s just saved you 20 hours! And when you consider there is often a time limit from submission deadline to feedback to be adhered to (at Bournemouth this is set as a three week turn around) that is a substantial saving of time.

There is of course an initial investment of time needed to become familiar with using the software, but even counting a couple of hours to do this, you are still saving in the region of 17-18 hours.

There are several tools you could use, but I prefer Audacity. It is free, well supported, available for both PC and Mac, and you can cut/copy clips together very easily. The full list of features is here for you to read if you want to full scope of the software.

One limitation of Audacity is that it does not output to MP3 format unless you download the LAME encoder (also free). This is as easy as Audacity to install and is strongly recommended.

So, now you’ve got Audacity and LAME working, what next? Easy, get on with your assessment as you normally do. When it comes to feedback, get the students work in front of you (paper or electronic, your choice), open Audacity, get the microphone connected and start recording.

I like to think logically, so I would work on one student submission at a time; record the feedback, export the recording (get a file naming convention and structure in place before you start; I use the PC hard-drive and the student number, not their name, for the ‘file name’), and upload to myBU (our VLE) before starting the next one.

Here are some comments I received on twitter from my quick question “Who uses Audacity for audio recordings? Any good?”;

  • floramcdora I have used Audacity for a number of years, including for making podcasts. V.good and easy to use.
  • teachlearn Audacity is useful and fairly easy to learn. Great notes from @macloo here http://tr.im/AJMC
  • scubagirl02 my colleagues prefer Audition over Audacity (quicker to edit) but not free
  • ianmcnaught Good considering it’s free, but not so good when compared to commercial apps such as Adobe Audition
  • ajwms I use Audacity a good bit. Not bad for the price! A good microphone makes a lot of difference
  • dsugdenI use iPadio because i can do it whenever there’s a phone connection (which with landline, there usually is) www.ipadio.com

Thanks to CarolineCooke for introducing me to the above YouTube video on how to create a Podcast using Audacity.

How do you handle audio feedback? Please comment below and share.

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