Published on: 25/02/2025 · Last updated on: 05/03/2025
Overview
Audio and video are becoming increasingly popular as alternatives to written feedback for student assessments. This case study reflects on my recent use of the Panopto platform to record video feedback to accompany my written text and annotations in the Moodle interface for a PGT summative essay assessment. I identify several benefits, including greater clarity and precision in feedback as well as important considerations around staff time constraints and student inclusion.
If you have queries or comments about this case study, please direct them to Peter Manning p.manning@bath.ac.uk. I am particularly keen to hear if the case study has helped to inform your own practice!
Background
Students tend to highlight assessment feedback as a priority within their appraisal and evaluation of their university experience (Mathisen 2012). Indeed, enhancing approaches to assessment and feedback has been identified as a key priority across the University of Bath. Wider debates in learning and teaching scholarship increasingly recognise that quality feedback is more than a transfer of information and instead relies on a process in which educators and students both actively participate (Winstone et. al 2021).
Digital technologies and platforms can play a crucial role in enabling such a “process”, particularly so as they allow a more streamlined use of alternative feedback mediums e.g. recorded audio or visual feedback approaches. Studies have suggested that visual feedback methods can augment (or better) traditional written feedback in several promising ways. For example, video feedback is thought to offer forms of “relational richness” that can build rapport and trust between teachers and students, thereby enhancing engagement (Mahoney et al 2019: 157).
Students are often not certain of what they are meant to do with their feedback or how to ‘decode’ it; recorded video feedback offers opportunities to engage and direct students around areas of improvement with greater clarity. And video feedback allows teachers to explain and demonstrate the cumulation of their thought process around a particular mark or point of improvement as if, in effect, a real time “show and tell” (Bjerknes et al. 2024: 44).
This case study reflects on a Panopto-based video feedback pilot on the recently introduced MSc Criminology in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences. Drawing on student feedback on their video feedback.
Approach
Before initiating the pilot, I had been curious about the potential benefits of screen capture as a way to demonstrate the marking process to students. My hope was to show – as a ‘live’ process – how teachers think through assessment in real time as a way to help students see what they could do to improve their essays. I was aware of the proliferation of new platforms and apps that are available to facilitate screen capture, e.g. screencastify, and I initially sought guidance from the team at TEL around its use.
From these conversations, an immediate consideration that I had not anticipated arose. While there are a range of external screen capture platforms such as Screencastify available, staff should be mindful – especially around student assessments – of risks around external platforms hosting our student’s information. The team at TEL suggested Panopto as an alternative, though noted the 50mb limit on Moodle for the inclusion of data files in the essay feedback field. I return to discuss the permutations of this limit in the subsequent reflections.
Teaching on the MSc Criminology represented an ideal opportunity to run the pilot. The Criminology programme had recruited a relatively smaller cohort for the academic year 2024/25 and I was confident I could provide video feedback for 11 students enrolled on the “State Crime, Rights, and Global Justice” unit as a supplement to the more conventional written summary and text-based annotations in the Moodle interface.
In terms of the mechanics of the process, the Panopto screen recorder can record both audio and video simultaneously. Having ensured that your microphone is selected and enabled in the recording settings in Panopto to capture the audio, you can bring the Moodle marking interface up and proceed to record verbal feedback and add any annotations or highlights that you wish to direct the student to. The screen capture function will record your Moodle interface and can also be configured to include a recording from your webcam for you to talk students through the feedback.
Once the recording is complete:
- Download the Recording:
- After completing your recording, log into your Panopto account.
- Navigate to the recording you wish to download.
- Look for the “Outputs” tab and select the option to download the video file. Here you will need to chose the video quality for the upload; a higher quality resolution will mean a larger file size, and therefore less time overall as a limit per video. A lower quality resolution allows slightly longer videos.
- Upload to Moodle:
- Once downloaded, you can upload the file to the student’s feedback box in Moodle.
Outcomes
The 50mb data limit for file uploads in Moodle is a constraint. However, I noted that setting a lower resolution quality for the download still allowed video feedback recordings of roughly around three minutes and thirty seconds. In dialogue with the TEL Team, we noted that even if a lower resolution is used, the impact of a large number of students uploading video files to Moodle could be significant. This encouraged the TEL team to create a ‘Recommended workflow’ for providing feedback using Panopto, which can be found on the Teaching Hub. More broadly, on reflection, the three minutes and thirty second limit still seemed to feel like an ideal time through which to offer key points of consolidation, drawing attention to specific annotations in the essay text, and to then offer a ‘wrap up’ take away for essay improvement.
On the one hand, this meant that the recordings became less a ‘live’ recording of the marking process than an additional point of supplementary feedback. On the other, the benefits of a visual approach felt intuitive in the sense that I could explain and connect points of improvement or development with far greater clarity and precision than through written feedback alone. In other words, it still enabled me to demonstrate my thought process as a marker as I had hoped. Student feedback on the videos noted that they helped them to “understand and have a better grasp of the concepts”, while praising the level of detail and depth allowed in the videos.
Conclusion
The use of video feedback alongside conventional written text feedback does represent an additional contribution in terms of time from teaching staff. I was able to provide this because of the relatively smaller PGT cohort size. The process might be too time intensive if deployed on larger undergraduate units (though I also suspect it could work very effectively if targeted at smaller or mid-range final year units). At the same time, I would note that the additional work was not, in effect, ‘doubling up’ because I could use the written feedback as a platform to cue and shape my recordings.
A question remains over whether we might offer recorded feedback as a replacement for conventional written feedback. My sense is that we would need to think carefully about questions of inclusion, accessibility and student needs. As feedback on the pilot suggested, some students may find verbal (and therefore audio) feedback more difficult to process and engage than written feedback, though notably Panopto does include a function to caption and export verbal audio as text if required. Teachers will need to be mindful that there will be particular cases and situations where written feedback will likely remain the most suitable approach.
References
Bjerknes, A.L., Opdal, L. and Canrinus, E.T., 2024. ‘I finally understand my mistakes’–the benefits of screencast feedback. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 33(1), pp.43-55.
Mahoney, P., Macfarlane, S. and Ajjawi, R., 2019. A qualitative synthesis of video feedback in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 24(2), pp.157-179.
Mathisen, P., 2012. Video feedback in higher education–A contribution to improving the quality of written feedback. Nordic journal of digital literacy, 7(2), pp.97-113.
Winstone, N., Boud, D., Dawson, P. and Heron, M., 2022. From feedback-as-information to feedback-as-process: a linguistic analysis of the feedback literature. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(2), pp.213-230.
Panopto guidance on the teaching hub
Guidance articles for Panopto: Panopto – Learning and Teaching