Audio Feedback

I spent the day making recordings of my feedback on the current assignment for Instructional Design. Took about five hours, all told. I do wonder whether the idea of audio feedback is good. Or rather I wonder how good. What are the limitations? Are there individula differences in its effects? I know that some people believe that they do better with the written feedback, But that probably doesn't take into account the fact that I give a lot (sometimes A LOT) more information with the audio. An example of that are the two dissertation proposals I responded to recently. Not sure why I did it, but I put Word comments directly in the document. The other, I did audio feedback. I'm not sure how many typed comments I put in the one, but I spent close to two hours talking about the other.

With the Instructional Design projects, I can give anywhere from a couple of minutes to fifteen minutes or more. I originally started doing it exactly because I was dissatisfied with writing emails about ID projects. I would do whatever I could to minimize the time it took, including saying as little as possible. That didn't give people much opportunity to make changes to improve their projects. The audio seems to give the chance to give a lot more corrective feedback. It does take a long time itself, though. Let's say an average of 15-20 minutes per person-assignment. That includes the first reading, the feedback, and preparing and posting the files to the Web for people to listen to.

The big question, of course, is whether it does any good. One student and I are doing some research currently to test her ideas about cognitive load and feedback. We are hypothesizing that the effects of reducing extraneous load in feedback witll parallel those of reducing it in instructional presentations. We are suggesting that audio feedback reduces extraneous load over textual and that feedback embedded in a document reduces it over feedback supplied separately. Our current data collection isn't going to successfully tell us that, though, so we will try to get some English teachers to help us out in Spring semester.

I have another question about it, however, That is, do people actually use the feedback? The ID course could be a place to start to look at that. If I had people go back to posting their projects on a wiki (that I control), I could, completely unobtrusively, find out whether the projects changed after the feedback. And whether the changes followed the feedback. I will look back at previous semesters first and then see if I could plan it for Spring. Still might need a different course to do a more experimental (quasi-experimental?) approach, such as seeing whether written feedback or audio feedback is used more.

Anyway, I'll be doing more feedback tomorrow in other courses.

Trying to get started again

I haven't been very good about writing in this blog for a long tme. But I've been pretty successful in writing my sailing blog, so maybe I can do this. In addition, I suspect that it might help a lot in keeping me on track in teaching. I have had a tendency to be slow in starting semesters in that I don't keep up with feedback and other key tasks for the first few weeks. Finally, I need to do better in paying attention to all classes on a regular basis.

So, where am I now? It is over halfway through the Fall semester. I'm almost caught up with most tasks for the three (four if you count freshman orientation, but it is not online) courses that I am teaching. That's a good thing because I'll be at the Sloan conference for several days next week. I don't want to spend a lot of time on courses while there.

Instructional Design is going reasonably well. I have alternated between using The Palace (my usual synchronous tool) and Dimdim (KSU has an open source installation of it). I have had students complete a questionnaire on the technology after each class session, so I can compare their views of them, once we get to that data. My own view continues to be that the audio systems (such as Dimdium, Elluminate, Learnlink, and so on) encourages one to lecture way too much. One of the things I like about Palace is that it all but forces me to find ways to keep the class interactive. (Other things include the price--free--, the cross-platform nature, the ease of using breakout rooms (try that with Dimdim), the low bandwidth, and others.)

That said, this week's ID class last night went quite well. I made key points but made sure to punctuate them with student activities. The pacing was good, and I ended at the planned time (Motivation: I was hungry!). Even when I lost the connection and had to come back in as a participant, not "host" I worked with the person who was identified as host to get control back with little problem In fact, my voice connection was clearer after that!

Most of these students either do not have microphones or refuse to admit it. That means that the real media involved here tend to be one-way audio, with a two-way text chat. I check the text chat for questions as well as for answers to my question. It seems to work pretty well as a system. I have not been using such things as showing websites, etc. but I am learning to use the whiteboard. Dimdim's whiteboard is mediocre for a couple of reasons, but the most annoying thing is that students (probably only one or two) play around with it, even when I put key terms or other notes up. They switch pages, copy and paste, move things, etc. I need to see if there are technological or social fixes for that.

Tomorrow and Sunday I need to complete the feedback for the next ID assignment as well catch up on the feedback for other courses before I leave. I'm noping it won't take too long!