Rapid Feedback for student learning

A new app created by learning specialists from the University of Melbourne will enable teachers to assess and provide helpful feedback in real time as students deliver oral presentations.

The Rapid Feedback app was developed by Professor David Shallcross from the Engineering Learning Unit and Antoinette Mendoza from Computing and Information Systems, to provide students with individual and immediate feedback on their work.

The app was originally developed to assess oral presentations but there are plans to repurpose it to provide feedback on dental, physiotherapy, nursing and music examinations.

“It will be adapted for a range of practical subjects,” Professor Shallcross said.

“We are also planning to translate this into other languages starting with Mandarin.”

Assessors are able to grade student presentations across different criteria. They can then select as many or as few pre-written comments as they like from an in-built library that addresses over 160 common issues.

The selected comments then appear in a PDF document that can be e-mailed to the student as soon as their presentation is completed.

Assessors also have the option to personalise the feedback by adding an audio file of spoken comments.