A colleague has just asked me whether I know of any courses where students get feedback to their written assignments in audio form - either as audio annotations to the document or a separate audio file.
I remembered hearing about people trying this, but I couldn't put my finger on any specific instances. There are none in my own faculty, as far as I can establish. The Open University's Cloudworks website includes some notes form people trying it at Athabasca University (Canada), Marietta College (USA), and Sheffield Hallam (UK) - but not the OU itself!
A quick check turned up some people at Staffordshire University using it in biosciences (August 2007), and a just-finished JISC-funded project at Leeds Metropolitan called "Sounds good", reported in The Guardian with a link to the new project website.
Sounds good indeed! They seem to have found some benefits for students, but I'm wondering what it does to the tutor workload. It ought to make it lighter, of course, but things are never so simple.
My tutor for the OU course I did last year gave me audio feedback on the draft of my ECA - so it's also possible that people may be doing it unofficial not under the auspices of an official project, although I'd be surprised if it was that widespread.
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