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"Hi, I'm Wendy Wild, I work in Accounting, and today I want to share with you some of
the work that we have been doing in the area of assessment but on formative pieces of work,
sometimes referred to as Forward feed or Feed Forward. The reason that we got involved in
with this was because students were coming us who were unhappy with the level of feedback
and the quality that they were getting and they were also receiving some of the feedback
after they had submitted the piece of work. Which, under EQAL, only four units, it is
vital that they get their feedback early and they can act on it.
What I propose to do is just show you exactly the type of podcast we gave them. It is a
personalised podcast. (It) is a very big unit that was involved in this work. There is 220
students actually on the unit and 150 of them took us up on the offer of having a personalised
podcast. They had to submit their draft onto Moodle. And although I say draft, it had to
be a near complete piece of work. We weren't prepared to accept plans because we found
in the past if they submit a plan then all you do is reiterate your requirements. Once
they've uploaded their assignments we gave the feedback.
OK, so first of all, we set up a separate area of Moodle for the students to submit
their piece of work. Then, you simply download their piece of work. We always asked for Word
documents. That was simply because we could not write on the PDF. So, you get your piece
of work, then on all of our computers at MMU we are lucky enough to BB Flashback. So we
set that away. Now I am going to record a 'New Movie' and I am using a headset. Obviously,
some people just like to use the microphone in their computer. But I will just set it
to headset. Once you are ready to start I would always advise having any documents such
as your assessment brief open and anything else you may want to refer to. Ok, so start
the recording. This is exactly what the students will see.
"OK, Hi Joe. Thank you very much for sending in your assignment for me to have a look at.
It is looking good. You seem to have done a lot of work. I can see in the bibliography,
you are quite well read in the area. So I am just going to give you a couple of points
to help you out. The first thing that you might want to consider is with regard to your
referencing. I can see here that you're using notation reference. I can actually show you
clearly you've got some notation referencing going on here and down the bottom. Here we
go. Now, unfortunately that is not Harvard referencing so we won't be accepting that
on this piece of work. If I can just go back to our Moodle site over here, at the beginning
of the Moodle site you can see clearly, just under the unit handbook, I've given you some
details about Harvard referencing and you can click through onto those detailed notes.
Alternatively, you could actually go onto the MMU Library Services and it actually has
a YouTube clip of how to do Harvard referencing. So if you want to improve your grade then
I would look at improving your referencing. Also, any changes you will have to be very
careful because if we just go back up, you are telling me that the word count is 2648.
But if we go to the assignment brief, if we just go down to the bottom where I have given
you some indication about marking criteria I have actually stipulated that the word count
is should be no more than 2500. So just be careful if you are adding anything else in.
Ok so that is generally two little areas which should move you from a 2.2 up the grades.
Ok, well thank you very much and good luck and I look forward to your final piece of
work." Ok, so we would now save that and the system actually allows you to listen
and record what you are saying and I would always advise doing that just in case something
has gone wrong with the recording. So just open in the player and just double check you
have recorded. So that is exactly what your student will
get. Once that is recorded we convert it to a .wmv file and send it back to the student
via Moodle so they get a personalised podcast. Now it is up to them if they take on board
the comments that I have made. We ask for the submission of this draft two weeks before
their final deadline and they get it back within a week to improve.
I think it is quite transformative. There was only two people that didn't take on board
the comments and that was because they were happy with the grade that they got. If we
just have a quick look at a summary of the grade improvements for this piece of work,
you can see here that a similar assignment was set in the previous year and marked by
exactly the same person and the average mark was 66%. For the average percentage for the
draft assignment before any students received Forward Feed the average was 65% so pretty
much the same. However, for those students that took part in the Forward Feed, the 150
of them, the average went up to 72% and those that didn't participate, they stayed at 66%.
We had 17 students that went up two grades and one that went up 3 grades from a third
to a first. So that was fantastic. For people that want to take this on-board
as part of their assessment strategy I would advise testing the system. You do need a lot
of memory. I would advise working with your E-Learning provider to make sure it is all
set up in Moodle correctly. Then ask for Word documents, unless you have that facility to
use the PDFs and be able to write on PDFs. We've used it for assignments. I know other
people in the department are considering it for dissertations and working on CVs with
students. So hopefully this has been informative and you take on board using Forward Feed with
audio-visual. Thank you."