Recorded Feedback

General structure of a recording

  • Introduce yourself – be friendly
  • Say which assignment you’re giving feedback on
  • Summarise your overall perceptions
  • Work through the assignment explaining and enlarging on points you’ve made
  • Refer back to the assessment criteria
  • Explain your process of arriving at a mark
  • Give the mark
  • Provide some attainable suggestions for improvement
  • Finish off in a friendly way

Top tips

  1. Have a clear reason for introducing podcasted feedback to your students, not just the novelty value or your desire to master a new technology. You need to ensure you have a reason you can articulate clearly which is in support of student learning.
  2. Make sure the podcasts integrate with the rest of the student learning materials – that way they have an added incentive to make use of the material.
  3. To encourage use of the podcasts ensure students know when they will be released.
  4. Keep them short, just a few minutes long is enough to take in at once, the evidence is that students prefer several short podcasts to one long one and will listen more often to short ones.
  5. An informal style is better than a formal one, initially you may need to make notes and then record but eventually you will be comfortable recording without lengthy notes.
  6. Remember that unlike a text document, you cannot ‘see’ the overall shape and content of a podcast so you need to signpost where you are in the file.
  7. Make sure all your students can receive audio files – and only send them to their university email addresses. Students need to know to look for the files and to make sure they have sufficient space in their email boxes! One work around is to place the files on the VLE, making sure you use any selective release facility.
  8. Check the volume level of your files – play them back the way you’re encouraging your students to use them.
  9. Go for the minimum acceptable quality, so mono rather than stero recording, MP3 format rather than WAV; this will keep the size of the sound files manageable.
  10. Back up your files!

(After Bob Rotheram, Leeds Met)

More Information

See the Sounds Good project website