Russell Stannard
Russell’s Reasearch into Feedback
In June 2006 in the Modern English Teacher, I wrote about the use of screen capture sofware as a way of providing feedback to students. This was followed by an article in the IATEFL SIG for technology in November 2006.
The Times Higher then wrote the first on-line article, when an explanation of my work was covered in their newspaper, Times Higher 2006 http://bit.ly/1oNkMh
There are a total of 7 videos that make up an interview with Russell Stannard about video feedback.
Imagine you videoed yourself every time you marked a student’s work. Imagine you could open up a student’s essay on your computer screen, press a button and from that moment on everything you said and any corrections you made on the work were all recorded on video. If you highlighted something, underlined a spelling mistake or talked about the organisation of the essay, it would all be recorded. Then you simply clicked a button and e-mailed the video to the student. They could then play it back, and listen and watch as you commented on their essay. You could get them to watch the video and then redraft their essay. Moreover, it wouldn’t require any fancy software, just standard screen recorder software that works at a click of the mouse.
This is already happening at Westminster University. Students receive live video recordings of me correcting their essays. Early results are encouraging. Students are taking much more interest in the feedback they receive. The amount of information that can be provided by the teacher is much greater, and students feel it is the nearest thing to a one-to-one feedback session. With recent discussions on improving feedback in higher education, this may be just the thing universities are looking for. It is powerful yet incredibly simple to use and provides documented proof of feedback.
While marking a piece of written work by some Chinese students three years ago, their teacher Russell Stannard had a brainwave.
Instead of correcting their scripts in the traditional way, by making comments in the right hand margin and giving them a mark, he created a video of himself going through each one. This was a piece of cake for Stannard, who is principal lecturer in multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster. “It allows you to record the screen of your computer as if you had a camera pointing at it,” he explains. Each of the students, who were taking an English language course, had their lecturer’s thought processes zapped over on a video, which they could open and listen to – as well as watch. It was as though they had received an individual tutorial from him. http://ind.pn/aSgtW
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