Video feedback for TMAs: The emotional impact of hearing the tutor

This project has been designed as a follow up of the project on screencast feedback using Jing in writing assignments, ran by LAL colleagues Felicity Harper, Hannelore Green (retired) and Maria Fernandez-Toro (retired).  Amongst the findings of Harper et al (2018) it was reported that students and tutors responded positively to the tool, finding that it enhanced the sense of tutor presence and facilitated communication of the tone of feedback: hearing the tutor’s voice explaining the corrections or recommendations for improvement onscreen led to increased affective engagement on the part of the student. Explanations were found to be clear and memorable. 

Technology plays an integral part of the teaching and learning provision at the OU and both tutors and students benefit from the various VLEs available.  The lack of human contact during the pandemic caused grave repercussions in our student’s emotional and mental wellbeing, therefore this project intends to research the emotional impact of hearing the tutor and how this in turn will help improve performance and achievement. This project aims fill the gap in tutor-student contact, and provide students with high quality feedback in speaking assignments.  By training tutors in the use of Screencast-o-matic to produce video feedback and enhance the sense of belonging as well as the tutor’s presence.  

The project will invite tutors from LAL modules at various levels and disciplines to compare results of the introduction of video feedback in assignments, as well as the effectiveness of this form of communication that will allow tutors to create more time-effective and manageable feedback and allow students to experience an innovative way of receiving tutor’s comments.  

This project is in line with APS framework to remove barriers and provide enablers to give students the opportunity to achieve equitable outcomes by creating a dialogic relationship between tutors and students through feedback.   

The term ‘feedback’ is commonly used within higher education to refer to the provision of comments on student work and is traditionally intended to provide a corrective function (Boud and Molloy 2013). According to Hattie (1987) and Black and William (1998), high-quality feedback is the most powerful factor in improving learning.  The aim of feedback is to bridge the gap between the desired level of skill and the actual level (Ramaprasad 1983).   

Language and Applied Linguistics modules carry out evaluations of written and spoken TMAs as an integral part of distance teaching and learning, using traditional methods of inserting comments or recording audio feedback for speaking assignments.  At the OU, colleagues Green et al (2018) carried out a scholarship project for the use of Jing screencasting for feedback in written assignment for Spanish and German beginners to upper intermediate modules.  In their scholarship paper they highlight the importance of high-quality feedback.  Within this context, our project aims to follow up the research initiated by our colleagues in LAL with the main focus on speaking assignments in language modules and some written assignments in Applied Linguistics modules, to enhance the rapport and tutor-student communication. 

Mahoney et al (2019) highlight the fact that existing research shows video feedback has a high level of acceptability amongst both teachers and learners and may help strengthen learner-marker relationships; however, the impact of video feedback on student learning outcomes is yet to be determined.  In this project we aim to determine to what extent the use of video feedback will impact on these relationships when working with adult language learners at the OU distance learning approach.  Mahoney et al (2019) argues that feedback is a process that involves the student and is forward looking and action-oriented, however it is often underutilised by both students and markers.  Video feedback holds potential due to its affordances over written or audio feedback in promoting a social interactional approach (Mahoney et al 2019).  

The notion of ‘emotions’ and the use of positive emotional language (Winstone et al, 2021) in screencast feedback will be explored to determine whether tutor’s approach to feedback and their mind-set are influenced and tutors set the emotional and relational tone of the feedback experience (Winstone et al, 2021) through the use of screencast feedback where facial expressions and a more conversational tone can be developed.  Winstone (2021) argues that there has been a recent ‘shift away from this transmission-oriented, cognitivist model towards a socio-constructivist understanding of feedback, which considers students’ engagement with and action upon the advice they receive as crucial parts of the process’ of knowledge acquisition.  

This project aims to explore the use of screencast feedback and effectiveness to encourage the tutor/student relationship and responsibility sharing (Winstone et al, 2021), and to provide opportunities to establish a collaborative feedback relationship (Bahula & Kay, 2021). We intent to evaluate the emotional impact of video feedback in both tutors and students, looking at how we can improve/develop students’ ‘feedback literacy’ (Winstone et al, 2021) and how this can influence and help improve retention and progression in LAL modules.