Using video feedback to support reflective learning and assessment in Auslan

Faculty: Faculty of Education

Overview

Cycles of feedback and reflection are powerful processes to support learning, both at university and in many professional and clinical settings.  As a stimulus for reflection, feedback on performance can be provided in many forms, including written, spoken and demonstrated, both in real time and recorded. In EDUC20076 Auslan and Visual Communication, providing recorded visual feedback was a game-changer for student reflections for an assessment task.

EDUC20076 Auslan and Visual Communication is an undergraduate breadth subject in the Faculty of Education (FoE). Students study in blended mode, in a language immersion approach and in an intensive (10 day) teaching period, meaning feedback turnaround times are very short and require efficient delivery mechanisms. Adding to the complexity, the subject is co-delivered by two teaching teams, with cultural and contextual studies taught and assessed by a faculty-based teaching team, and language instruction in Auslan taught by native-speaker tutors from an Auslan teaching agency.

Students in the subject are assessed not on their language acquisition itself, but rather on their ability to critically reflect on their developing knowledge of Auslan and visual communication skills. As a stimulus for their assessed reflection folio, groups of students perform a hurdle task, each signing one minute of a five-minute story they have created in Auslan. Prior to the pandemic, students presented these stories in class and were given feedback in Auslan immediately afterwards by their Auslan tutor. During the pandemic, students pre-recorded their group presentation on Zoom, and the Auslan tutor provided live feedback in Auslan over Zoom.

Actions

Seeing some advantages to students of pre-recording the presentations rather than performing in real time, Subject Coordinator Kate Leigh and Tutor Janelle Giffin partnered with the Teaching and Learning Innovation team, including Karen Maeda, Digital Learning Support Consultant (Assessment), and learning designers Annabel Orchard and Suzanne Carter, to build on the benefits of pre-recording and to enhance the delivery of feedback to support students with their assessed reflections.

The partners designed an approach where students record their group presentations as a video and submit them to FeedbackFruits as an Assignment Review activity. Students can rehearse, then record, then re-record if they wish, allowing them to submit a polished performance and reducing the potential for nerves to affect their presentation. The Auslan tutors are then able to watch the videos in FeedbackFruits, pause at specific moments and record time-coded visual feedback in Auslan, including positive and constructive feedback and corrections to signing if needed. Students can then watch (and re-watch) their recording, see the time-coded video feedback in context, and then reflect on their learning and growth.

Outcomes

We asked Kate Leigh about the rationale and the outcomes.

Q: What sort of feedback do students of Auslan need?

Kate: Students need feedback on basic signs, which have aspects of hand-shape but also movement, location and expression or non-manual features. But also, as you move into more communicative visual aspects of Auslan, there’s the use of space and movement, and things that just can’t be easily captured in writing. So the video feedback is a very efficient way of giving that really clear feedback and modelling.

This was a really key experience that students used in their reflective writing assessment. It really gave them an opportunity to see their own growth from the beginning of the subject, but also to think about what to do next, and to really link into those high-level reflective components, especially around planning for the future.

Q: Did you notice improvements in the quality of feedback?

Kate: I think the quality was better because the Auslan tutors didn’t miss out on seeing things. In a live presentation the students keep signing and the tutor may look down to make a note and miss either a fabulous thing that they could give really congratulatory feedback on, or a misconception or an error that they could have given modelled feedback on how to improve. I think the way FeedbackFruits actually also articulates things as either a ‘compliment’ or a ‘suggestion’ is also a good way to remind tutors that we have to look at what the strengths are, as well as identify and support students in their challenges.

Q: Did the students and teachers find FeedbackFruits easy to use in this way?

Kate: Yes, our students really did find it very easy to use, possibly supported by the fact that many of them are using it in other subjects. I asked some of the Deaf tutors when they came in to teach and they said it was brilliant. Some of them preferred to give written feedback, and some preferred to give a combination of both video feedback and written comments in the video feedback interface. We were also really fortunate, Teaching and Learning Innovation created a training video for us, and we were able to then re-record that with Auslan interpreting. I was ready with the back-up plans, but they must have found it very intuitive and the training clear and helpful because there were no issues at all. They worked it out quite easily and used it really effectively.

Thank you to Kate Leigh for sharing your experience! It’s great to see an application of video feedback with an intrinsic rationale and a positive outcome.

Screenshot of FeedbackFruits interface

Staff resources

First published: 11 Dec 2024