Audio, Video and Zoom Feedback: Practices, Perceptions and Potentialities

Abstract

<p>Situated within the context of teacher education, this presentation traces a teacher-educator’s journey in search of enhanced feedback practices to address the challenges of managing feedback accentuated by social distancing amid the global pandemic. It discusses how (student-)teachers on ELT undergraduate and postgraduate courses at a university in Hong Kong perceive and respond to different forms of feedback.<br>The presentation begins by outlining the reasons for the teacher-educator’s shift from written to alternative forms of feedback, specifically audio, video and zoom feedback. Citing authentic audio-visual examples of the feedback types alongside (student-)teachers’ voices, their interaction with the feedback and output based on the feedback, it highlights the relational benefits of audio and video feedback over the written version and their potential in heightening learners’ cognitive engagement (Espasa et al., 2022; Parkes & Fletcher, 2016). By illustrating how screencasts in video feedback allow teachers to show as well as tell their response to students’ work, its impact on learners’ sense-making process is visualized (Mahoney, Macfarlane & Ajjawi, 2019).<br>In particular, the presentation showcases the teacher-educator’s recent success with zoom feedback conversations, introduces techniques used to facilitate meaningful dialogue with students, and features notable ELT pedagogic gains. It demonstrates how the effective design of feedback experiences influences teaching and learning in multiple ways.<br>The presentation ends with the teacher-educator reflecting critically on keys lessons learnt, how this has helped re-conceptualize feedback practices, how learner agency could be maximized, and the affordances of technology in supporting this in the post-pandemic age.<br>Through examining the value of audio, video and zoom feedback, it aims to encourage educators to consider diversified ways of engineering feedback processes within their own course learning activities to engender higher quality and more “actionable” feedback for more positive learning outcomes (e.g. Malecka, Boud & Carless, 2020; Winstone & Carless, 2020).<br></p>