Hearing voices: first year undergraduate experience of audio feedback

Abstract

Recent changes to the UK higher education sector, including a rise in numbers and diversification of the student body, resultant larger class sizes and student: staff ratios, greater modularisation of courses with fewer coursework assignments, and students having less face-to-face contact with teaching staff, have presented numerous challenges. The parallel rise in the use of digital technologies in professional practice, despite calls for their adoption in order to personalise learning, can often be seen to exacerbate the perceived dehumanising effect of this massification. Amid a growing discourse highlighting the importance of feedback to student learning, the focus of this study centres on the use of digital audio feedback with first year undergraduates. Eschewing the positivist approaches that are prevalent in learning technology studies, the aims of the research are to understand the student experience of audio feedback in order to inform both professional practice and policy. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with first year Education Studies undergraduates, the research is a phenomenological study of the lived experience of participants through open and honest dialogue in order to arrive at a situated and negotiated understanding. In conducting a deeper and structural investigation that researches with people, the study moves beyond any technologically deterministic view, and sets any understanding in the wider context of students’ own interpretation of the feedback process, and as such shifts the discourse from technological affordance to pedagogical experience. Whilst the use of audio feedback is seen to alleviate the failures of communication often identified in the feedback process, the findings are also seen to be significant in terms of dialogic perception, studentship and engagement, as well as facilitating a shift from statement to discourse and the possibility of establishing more meaningful learning relationships with students.