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.