Grading with Screencast Video Feedback
Apr 17th, 2009 by Christopher Stein
For my midterms in two classes this semester I decided to give my students visual and audio feedback by doing screencasts of me going over their projects and making comments. I’m teaching technology courses so the midterms were web sites in one class and interactive Flash ActionScript programming projects in the other class.
I had thought about this before and then I watched this presentation on “Providing Asynchronous Audio Feedback Using Adobe Acrobat” (https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a227210/p32922142). The people in this presentation were online teachers but I think many of the ideas still apply.
I use rubrics to grade the projects and in the past have written comments, sometimes extensive, next to each of the rubric areas. The students then get these written comments as a PDF file. This time I gave them the PDF file with the rubric and their scores but used the screencast for the comments.
I’ll post more on this process later if there is interest and I have time but overall it took a while to get into the flow of things and figure out some technical issues. Once those were overcome I found I spent about the same amount of time with the comments as I did when they were written but that the comments were richer and more extensive.
I asked informally for feedback from the students on what they thought of it and have only received a few replies; they have generally been positive. The first response was the kind that helps make all of this worth it: “By the way ,this is the most detailed response i ever got from a professor at Bmcc. Screencast idea greatest ever!” Another student was also positive and had a suggestion: “Can we get the videos in our flash drive? It took so long for me to watch my review because I did not internet in my house, so I guess more students do not have internet.”
A good reminder for me that I have to be mindful of students’ access to technology.
Fascinating post, Chris. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while now, so it’s great to hear about your experiences. Readers of this post might also be interested in Kimon’s post on grading.
Chris, you’re amazing! You’re a natural at integrating cutting-edge technology and pedagogy, so your students are learning the tools in a way that truly empowers them to use what they’re learning to pursue their own goals. (If CUNY allows us to audit other faculty members’ courses, I’m signing up for yours.)
And thank you for being such a generous colleague and continuing to share all this information (and your experiences) with us.
What you’re doing is way beyond most of our skill levels, but the one thing I think we could all do is learn how to do what you used to do: provide asynchronous feedback via rubrics with written comments as PDF files. Do you do all the work in Word and then simply save it as a PDF file? If not, what do you do? Regardless, would you be willing to create a Wiki page briefly explaining what you do and providing instructions for how we could do it (maybe with an example of an item or two from one of your rubrics)? This would be ENORMOUSLY valuable to those of us who want to do this but don’t how to begin.
Thanks again.
Karen
@Matt be prepared for it to take a little longer the first time through. I’ve found that having the rubric helped me because I could focus my comments better. I’m about to go read Kimon’s post and see what he’s doing
@Karen, I don’t think that from a technical level it’s beyond most people but it is not simple and definitely more difficult than writing with a pen on a printed paper. That difficulty will be a hurdle for many. Why I decided to go for it is that feedback on the students significant project is one of the more important and valued things I can do as a teacher. The screencasts allow a richness in the feedback that, I hope, improves student understanding and learning.
In terms of my process, I’ll look into creating the wiki page you suggested. There could be some improvements in the process. The workflow is a little awkward and time consuming. In a nutshell I do this:
1. put the rubric and the students names into a spreadsheet
2. go through each project and give scores and make brief comments in the speadsheet for each rubric item. The spreadsheet format allows quick copying and pasting when comments are similar for students. Also it allows me to make sure I’m consistent with the scores for each rubric item.
3. Open the screen recording software and record myself going over each project elaborating on the comments. (I use IShowU on the Mac, most of my comments are too long for the Jing 5min limit, usually between 8 and 15 mins). The recordings are a straight shot, no editing is involved.
4. Upload the video files created in the previous step to screencast.com (it’s not the best solution but for now I can upload them all at once and it allows for private videos and you can even attach documents).
5. Copy the URL for each video into the grading spreadsheet.
6. Put their scores into a PDF file (written in pages and exported as pdf) that basically just shows the rubirc with their scores for each section and the total score.
7. Send an email to each student with the PDF file attached and the URL for the video in the body (the text of the email is form letter type, the same for each student).
So, there’s a lot to it. I find that doing the initial run through before making the comments is helpful for me in making sure that the scores are consistent. It also gets faster as I go along.
I am lucky in that my classes are capped at 28 students (usually somewhat less in actuality). If I had 4 sections of 40 students I don’t think I could do this. In that situation if I were to attempt it I would have to make the feedback shorter and not do the two step process of writing down comments then making the recording. One thing I would keep is that I don’t mention their grade during the screencast. Their grade is only shown in the printed document. This way if I change my mind about how to grade a certain section during the middle of the process I can do it without modifying the recordings.