Giving Better Feedback: Oral Feedback

During an interview with Online Classroom, professor Rosemary Cleveland and instructional designer Kim Kenward suggested some tips for providing students with feedback in their online courses. Even though their interview was targeted towards completely online courses, there were some key takeaways for instructors teaching both blended, and even completely traditional courses.

One of their tips was to "Consider various formats" for giving feedback. As Cleveland and Kenward pointed out, most students and instructors are familiar with traditional, text-based feedback -- but that doesn't mean that it's the only way. They cited a survey of their own students, in which "70 percent liked having audio feedback because they could hear the instructor's voice, which makes the message more personal."

And it's not just students who like audio feedback: oral feedback is also more efficient for instructors to produce. With the steady advance of course management systems, it also doesn't require a lot of technical expertise to easily give audio feedback. Both Blackboard and Moodle, for example, have audio recording built-in to their grading components.

For more information, read the article from Faculty Focus.