Digitally recorded feedback: a sustainable practice?

Digitally recorded assessment feedback offers advantages over text. It can be more time effective for educators to create, and students typically find the comments to be more detailed, clear, and personalised. These advantages have been attributed to media richness; more information can be provided in a short recording than can be written or typed in the same amount of time. The message in a digital recording can also be enriched through the inclusion of tone and expression. However, our recent research indicates that students may also perceive feedback comments to be more detailed, clear, and personalised when they are provided through multiple channels (such as rubrics and written comments together) rather than when either of those channels are provided singularly. This raises a question for educators: Is the additional investment in multiple feedback channels for one assessment submission justifiable in comparison to providing a single digital feedback recording? We address this question by comparing the perceptions of 172 university students, who either received a single digital recording or written comments plus a rubric, with regard to the level of detail, usability, and personalisation of the comments. The results revealed no significant differences between the two groups of students, which suggests that similar benefits may be gained by students who receive one digital feedback recording as those who receive two channels of text-based feedback together. The paper concludes with propositions about how educators may be able to leverage digitally recording feedback recordings to maximise sustainability of their feedback practices.