Professor Laurence Goldstein, Head of SECL and Professor of Philosophy, has inaugurated a scheme that offers the option of feedback on essays via video-link.
Evidence shows that comments painstakingly written by a lecturer on students’ work often don’t get read when the work is returned. Some students are interested just in the mark. At the University of Kent, students have short, individual feedback sessions, where they have the opportunity to respond to the lecturer’s comments, and a dialogue ensues. This is obviously a much more pedagogically valuable system because the student receives personal attention and is able to enjoy a conversation about his or her work with an expert on the subject.
One drawback of the practice, though, is that many students now have to do paid work to make ends meet, and, if they are not on campus already, find it inconvenient to come in for a tutorial that is not on the timetabled schedule of lectures and seminars.
Laurence worked with Ian Utting and Simon Thompson, both from the School of Computing, to create and pilot a video-linked tutorial scheme. Tutorial sessions are scheduled electronically and relevant information is downloaded from the University’s virtual learning environment, Moodle. Student and lecturer are at their remote locations with webcams, and the conversation is Skype-like, except that most of the screen is occupied by the student’s essay, with scrolling and text manipulation on both screens under the control of the lecturer. The two ‘talking heads’ occupy a relatively small area of the screen.
A demonstration of the system was given by Steve Bailey, the University’s Learning Technologist, on Wednesday, February 27.
The great virtue is flexibility. Laurence explains: ‘Tutorials can be held at mutually convenient times, the lecturer could, perhaps, be travelling on a Eurostar train, the student sitting in a café in Kent or Tashkent. Students find this kind of interaction with their teachers convenient and attractive, but I wish to emphasize that this will be an alternative to, not a substitute for, our face-to-face tutorials, since some people place a high value on meeting in person.’
‘The software used is WebEx, produced by Cisco. The University of Kent’s School of Computing sends around 20 students each year to California for work placement with Cisco, and it is a happy circumstance that the WebEx conferencing software should be so readily adaptable to our academic purposes.’