A qualitative assessment of providing quality electronically mediated feedback for students in higher education

Abstract

Abstract: The subject of feedback for students is one of the most important contributors to the student experience and attracts one of the lowest responses within the National Union of Students survey. This paper reports on the feasibility of providing feedback on written assignments by marking electronically using the comments function on Microsoft Word and also providing verbal feedback via use of a hand held digital voice recorder. The students (post graduate part-time business students) were surveyed as to their response to this feedback. The paper reports the feedback from both the tutor and the student perspective and examines the impact on the experience of both groups. The results were positively in favour of the use of audio feedback but are different to results in other studies in that it is concluded that a combination of both typed and verbal feedback was preferred by the students. Keywords: audio-feedback; feedback; written feedback; electronically mediated feedback; recorded feedback; online submission; assessment; student experience; National Student Survey; NSS.