Sounds Good

Sounds Good is piloting the use of digital audio to provide students with feedback on their assessed work. The main aim is to establish whether it is possible to give richer feedback to students and save assessors’ time. If students and staff can be shown to benefit, the project will be of considerable interest in all sectors of education.

Sounds Good, based at Leeds Metropolitan University, is led by Bob Rotheram, National Teaching Fellow. One of the smaller projects funded under JISC’s 02/07 Users and Innovation Call, it builds on Bob’s exploratory work using MP3 files for summative feedback on student assignments on a postgraduate programme. This indicated benefits for students: feedback which was more extensive, clearer, more personal and easily-accessible. Staff also benefited: saving time by speaking rather than writing the feedback. Students were very positive about the experiment.

Now a team of Leeds Met staff is investigating further. The focus is being widened to include both formative and summative feedback, in various disciplines, at different educational levels. The experimentation includes delivering digital sound files containing feedback to students via a virtual learning environment, email and mobile devices such as widely- available MP3 players.

Project outputs will include:

• practice guidelines (written and as podcasts) for practitioners wishing to use digital audio for feedback to students;
• advice on integration of digital audio feedback into a widely-used virtual learning environment (Blackboard Vista).