Feedback on Student Assignments: Audio as an Alternative to Typing

This paper describes a comparative study into the use of audio versus text as a form of feedback on student assignments. Many educational institutions currently use typewritten feedback, but developments in technology now make the provision of feedback in audio form a feasible proposition. The expansion of Higher Education has meant that creating conventional typewritten feedback can be very time consuming for academic staff. There is therefore a need to find mechanisms by which the creation of feedback can be made more efficient and effective. Audio has the potential to enhance feedback by being quicker to produce and of higher quality. The study considers two experiments to investigate the hypothesis that the use of audio feedback enhances the feedback process for both tutors and learners. Two hypotheses are tested: the time-reduction hypotheses H1; and the quality enhancement hypothesis H2. The results indicate that recording feedback in audio form can decrease the time it takes to create feedback by 40-50%. Moreover, tutors report that the process of creating audio feedback is less constraining than producing typewritten feedback. Learners report that audio feedback is richer in that it conveys more information than its type-written equivalent; and it is more authentic in that it gives them a better insight into the assessment procedure adopted by tutors. It helped to break down the tutor-learner barrier.