1. David Lush UWE L&T Annual Conference April 26th, 2012
UWE Bristol Feedforward Screencasts: Putting the Horse before the Cart?
David Lush
UWE L&T Annual Conference
April 26th, 2012

2. Spoiler alert! Feedforward… …Screencasts:
Let’s prepare students so the exam process is less of an obstacle
…Screencasts:
By using web-based, multimedia ‘screencasts’
Putting the Horse Before the Cart?
At the moment it’s the wrong way around
Most students ‘learn’ about the exam process by sitting exams and getting ‘feedback’ afterwards
obstacle to achievement

3. Exams as an obstacle to achievement
‘coursework’ (Comp B) vs ‘exam’ (Comp A) performance
2 ‘random’ Bioscience modules at Levels 1, 2 & 3
Students completing all assessments
paired comparison

4. Exams & Coursework: L1 Performance
Difference of 23%
Highly significant

5. Exams & Coursework: L1 Performance
Difference of ‘only’ 6%
Highly significant
equates to a ‘class’ difference for 1/3rd students

6. Exams & Coursework: L2 Performance
Difference of 19%
Highly significant

7. Exams & Coursework: L2 Performance
Difference of ‘only’ 6%
Highly significant

8. Exams & Coursework: Performance
B-A gap is negative for good students
‘good’ students do better on exams than CW

9. Exams & Coursework: L3 Performance
Difference of 11%
Highly significant

10. Exams & Coursework: L3 Performance
Difference of 11%
Highly significant

11. Hold the Front Page!
Students do less well on exams than coursework!

12. Exams vs Coursework Differences
Concentrated vs Extended
Memory vs External Resources
Monologue vs Dialogue during creation
Min feedback vs Feedback
Single vs Multiple (at the moment...)
Unseen vs Seen
Artificial vs Relevant
Differences conspire to affect assessment outcomes

13. What do assessment outcomes reflect?
Assessment outcomes are conflation of student’s…
Intrinsic knowledge
Nature of / engagement with assessment process
With coursework both can be relevant
Scientific Posters, Lab Reports
‘entanglement’ of knowledge & process is appropriate
With exams, the process is artificial but it still influences the outcome
‘entanglement’ of knowledge & process not appropriate
malign influence of exam process compounded by…

14. Malign influence of exam process
Minimal feedback
3 hours concentrated, complex effort  %
don’t see marked scripts
‘generic’ feedback of little use (and too late?)
Experience
one exam per module
‘novelty’ of final year exams
Revision
concentration on notes (knowledge)
necessary but not sufficient
at the expense of practice (process)
the ‘rules of the game’/assessment journey

15. The Exam Assessment Journey: Q  A
Experimental Design & Analysis (Level 2)
compulsory module + maths/stats = !
support for the exam assessment journey important… Q
14 years of past papers A
51 scans/photos of high-scoring scripts
students can see what constitutes a good answer
quicker, more relevant than ‘model’ answers?

16. The Exam Assessment Journey: Q  A

17. But how about the ‘’ in Q  A ?
What was the route from question to answer?
Faced with a 10/10 answer to a question, what was the journey in between?
real answers not written with that explicitly in mind
Support for that journey, like the journey itself, should be dynamic
Screencast approach
screencasts are videos of all screen activity (plus audio)
MS Office apps, YouTube; any software, any internet
plus digital ink on tablet pcs
can be ‘published’ to the web

18. Resources to Create Screencasts
Software/Hardware
Commercial (Camtesia £175)  freeware (CamStudio)
Preferably a tablet pc (for digital ink); mic (headset?)
Time
‘professional’ approach  20 hours/hour?
‘amateur’/YouTube approach  3 hours/hour?
includes 1 hour/hour for software rendering
I’m a ‘professional’ but my lectures are ‘amateur’
Nerve
initially a bit self-conscious
material in ‘public domain’
open to (forensic!) scrutiny

19. Student Feedback All positive (so far...)
“… everyone was wondering if there were going to be more screencasts and chi sq tutorial answers put up as we all find them incredibly useful.. (please!)”
“…the screencasts you put together for EDA are fantastic, have found them very useful!”
“Just want to say thank you for doing these screencasts, i've been doing them all week and i am now understanding things! With out them i prob would have failed!! ”
“I just want to say thank you for putting together the narrated screencasts. It was of great help during my revision for the EDA exam. I wish that all lecturers/module leaders had the same approach to teaching as you. English is not my first language so the possibility of pausing or listening the explanation again was fantastic!!”

20. Does it Work? Perhaps a tentative ‘possibly maybe’ ?
Gap between CW and Exam disappearing ?
Pre-screencast (2008) vs post-screencast (2009)

21. Horse now before Cart – Job Done?
The exam screencasts ~ 15 hours in length
Could ‘death by screencast’ replace ‘death by PowerPoint’?

22. But isn’t providing such extensive, repetitive, hand-holding walkthroughs just spoon-feeding the students, encouraging rote-learning and is just an example of shallow, mindless training rather than proper education befitting a university, Dave? Well, Dave, isn’t it?
I’d love to answer that, but we’re out of time…