Hi Stephanie,

Thank you for teaching us about how to use Grademark in Turnitin. I agree that it can help students to hear the tone in the instructors comments. Hopefully then it decreases student anxiety while facilitating learning. I thought about how many times I tried to call a student to review the feedback only to end up playing phone tag with the student. This allows student feedback they can view at their leisure. My only concern is with ADA compliance. It seems as if you solved for that too by having the audio comments also embedded as written comments. Is my understanding correct?

Thank you for your comments, Morgan! You are absolutely right. The audio narrative comments are meant to summarize what is already included in the paper as embedded feedback. This should address ADA compliance issues.

Thank you for your feedback!

Stephanie

Stephanie,

I love the question you posed about the effectiveness of feedback. I was just having this same discussion today with a colleague. What makes some feedback superior than others? There are many faculty at GCU that offer what I would consider to be "good" feedback, but what makes feedback "effective," so students can take what the teacher shared with them and do something with it in the future. Audio feedback can certainly help with this. Timeliness is another factor you mentioned. I also think feedback on specific criteria and feedforward on global skills that apply to later writing tasks and other genres helps make feedback "effective" and not just "good." Thank you for sharing your insights with us!

Best,

Meredith

Is there anything like this for use without being tied to Turn It In (TII)?

I really like this idea and would like to implement it but not all assignments are written papers to be submitted to the TII system.

Thank you for this careful overview on feedback.  You cover all the big questions in this presentation. I think you speak for every online instructor with the questions and challenges you present. I love the justification you offer for using audio as a compliment to written. Why not? Tone may or may not make feedback a little easier to "take" but I feel it can help even more with what to emphasize. Prioritizing what needs to be addressed the most is what I believe is lost in a string of written comments. I find this is especially challenging with marginalized or "at risk" or under represented students. 

Renee

Thank you for sharing this presentation, Stephanie. I have often thought that being able to have a conversation with the student would be so much more effective than all of my written feedback, but sadly there are not enough hours in the day to call and talk each student through their essay. Alas! :) But this idea of the grademark software and the audio component are a great midway point, and I can see how students would find them incredibly helpful. Thank you for providing us with information about this great resource!

All the best,

Amy