Does one size fit all? Comparing video-feedback in two different courses

Abstract

Several surveys show that students appreciate feedback on their assignments in order to learn more, and to understand more about their academic progress. In order to personalize the feedback, this has been recorded on video and distributed to the students. In video-feedback, we as lecturers can stress certain messages in a different way than in written feedback. It is also possible to communicate a lot more in a 3-5-minute video. In this paper, we compare the students’ opinions about video-feedback. In one course, the students received both video feedback and written feedback as a follow up on the same assignment, and in two other courses they only received video feedback. Through interviews, we have investigated two different approaches. This has allowed us to look into two different approaches, and how students perceive this. In the course with the video-feedback and the written feedback, the students prefer the written feedback, and in the two courses with video-feedback only, the students are very positive and report on learning outcomes from the feedback in addition to them also wanting video-feedback in other courses as well. The results were surprising, as theory explains why video-feedback should be preferred.